Nothing more or less than that the trait of being female is fundamentally different from the trait of being conservative, so we shouldn't necessarily expect the relative absences of these groups in certain positions (in the general sense) to have similar root causes.
Frankly I think your conclusion is too obvious to you, to the extent that you aren't considering other (fairly obvious) possible mechanisms, like the one another commenter mentioned (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20578689). I think he or she did a good job of articulating a similar point in a different way.
Would you accept as a possibility that neither of these imbalances is due primarily to "hiring" bias? Or do you have some generally applicable evidence of the "hiring" bias you're talking about in either case, i.e. identity, physical or otherwise, being used to deny applicants access to a position? I'm just saying the question is more complicated than you're making it out to be; I don't claim to have the answer. It seems that you are claiming that, and IMO you're reading between a lot of lines to cast other commenters' words in the form you're looking for.
("hiring" in quotes above because I think a lot of young women are put off STEM while they're still in school, despite the fact that they would not have had any trouble getting into the program(s))
Do I think that the gender gap in STEM is because of discrimination? My guess is no, or at least largely no, but I'm not sure I know enough to be dogmatic on that subject.
Do I think that the gap in the social sciences is because of discrimination (or at least bias)? Given the liberal/conservative gap in school administrators, it seems to me that it would be almost a miracle if that wasn't at least part of the reason... but I have no concrete information.
I thought that inference was pretty obvious - so obvious that I assumed you understood it when you made your comment, and that you therefore just didn't want to admit the point. The alternatives were to assume the worst of your honesty (the course I took), to assume the worst of your understanding, or to assume the worst of the clarity of my post. In charity, I should have chosen the last, but... I didn't.
At any rate, you said:
> Well, since female is something you are, while conservative is something you think, I imagine the reason for the latter discrepancy is probably quite different from the reason for the former.
The "discrepancy" we were talking about is differences in the rate of hiring. My comment was (trying to say) that, if we suspect discrimination for the male/female imbalance, shouldn't we suspect it for the liberal/conservative imbalance? Suspecting bad faith on the part of your comment, then, you certainly seemed to be saying that it was OK to not hire conservatives, but not OK to not hire women.
But, presuming good faith on your part, then what were you trying to say?
> Well, since female is something you are, while conservative is something you think, I imagine the reason for the latter discrepancy is probably quite different from the reason for the former.
So what do you think the reasons are? How does what you are vs what you think affect the situation? You complain that I didn't conclude my point, but you left a lot to the imagination also.
> I'll say this much: I do think it's wrong to not hire somebody because they're female, and I don't think it's necessarily wrong to not hire somebody because they express some arbitrary opinion that I think is bad. For instance, if somebody told me in an interview that "women should be legally considered property, without any rights of their own," I would not hire that person.
I would hope you would not hire that person! But do you think that the liberal/conservative imbalance in social science departments are because almost all the conservative applicants are deplorable?