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I wonder where you live. I have heard many reported family courts cases over the years and they have always been resolved in favour of the woman, sometimes grossly so.

For instance, I have one friend whose wife went literally mad (post-partum psychosis). Total psycho breakdown level mad when she was off her meds, which happened a lot. Fortunately the courts awarded him custody of the kids. Unfortunately they are still, years later, dragging their heels over the divorce and he his still not yet divorced. There is no reason for this beyond the fact that family law in his (western) country is designed to benefit the woman to the cost of the man, to a nearly absurd degree.

Re: opportunity. Yes, opportunity is very often zero sum. Most obviously hiring and firing at the company level are zero sum games - if a woman got the job because she's a woman, it means you didn't. Whilst the economy in general may not be zero sum over the long run, it sure is at the moment you're applying for a job. Likewise for cases like this:

https://sites.google.com/site/codejamtoioforwomen/

where tickets to a very expensive conference were reserved only for women. Limited number of places at the conference = zero sum game and therefore, very much unequal opportunity. Note that there's a female only version of Code Jam because women couldn't compete with the men in the mixed gender version.



> Note that there's a female only version of Code Jam

That proves that it isn't always zero-sum. They've opened up more spots by creating an additional event for women.


That's some impressive mental backflipping.

I wasn't talking about the competition. Success in the female only codejam led to tickets to Google I/O. It's a conference and a very popular one at that - the sort of conference where the organisers routinely give attendees free phones. Do you really think in previous years there were hundreds of seats sitting empty, hundreds of tickets that could have been sold sitting around unsold?

I can tell you what happened. Conference seats that were previously gender neutral got reserved for women, by the creation of another mechanism that was also reserved for women. Zero sum games.




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