It doesn't seem like the system dampens. Instead, there seems to be some kind of anger that for 99% of men "privilege" means working hard, making compromises, and other stuff that's roughly as crappy as being a housewife. Men aren't all that happy they've got this "privilege", and when women have the option of being a salaryman they feel like they must have been cheated because it's not a top-floor office where everyone just sips whisky on leather lounges.

Having to deal with men who "aren't happy" that they exist sure sounds like something that would make the job suck more for women than it does for men.

Why?

I don’t really like being accepting of oscillation.

Forward movement, progress, shouldn’t be defined as updating who we discriminate against.

Progress would be to stop discriminating. Optimizing for equality of outcome seems to be causing discrimination. That doesn’t look like progress to me.

It is not progress at all. The pendulum of who to discriminate against has been swinging back and forth for hundreds of years. And every time a new group is targeted, it is to the cheers of some other group.

It's difficult to have a factual debate around workplace discrimination because anyone who suggests that women are being favoured, is instantly attacked by social justice activists who rely more on moral outrage rather than facts or logic. A lot of the discussion on this thread today would not be something that people would say out loud near coworkers.

I agree with you strongly. This isn't progress. This is essentially the same shit on a different day, and amplified by social media. I'm by no means accepting of it, I just feel this analogy is more accurate.

I brought up dynamic systems to point out that this isn't and won't be a three-step process of "the extreme, the other extreme, the golden middle". This phenomenon is continuous and oscillating; more than that, it can be dampened, stable or runaway, and which of those it is, depends on a lot of factors. If we manage to dampen it down, then we'll have made progress.

If you aren't just hiring every person who walks through the door, you are discriminating. The question is whether you are hiring on relevant characteristics or irrelevant bullshit, and whether your job is more appealing to people on the basis of protected characteristics in ways that end up with an overwhelmingly-male workforce of people willing to be treated unfairly. Being thoughtful and taking responsibility for which people you are choosing to include is at least honest, unlike accepting a sexist status quo as magically "neutral".

How do you factor in path dependence? (A kind of inertia, that either requires some affirmative action style correction, or an "unfairly" long time to overcome.)

I don't see path dependence as explicit component of this model; "affirmative action style corrections" however are accounted for in the amplitude; they're part of the corrections that happen (or increasingly, IMO, overcorrections).