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I'm not implying that I assume anything at all. *sigh*

Apologies and thank you for clarifying your position a little.

You realize, I hope, that actual discrimination, hiring preferentially or paying more based on gender, is actually an offense that police and district attorneys and courts investigate and prosecute and can easily destroy anyone for, right? If you have any evidence for anyone doing that in any western nation you can literally shoot it off to a state lawyer and see careers if not the entire enterprise destroyed, that's no joke.

Ah, so prosecuting anyone that demonstrably introduces inequality of opportunity. Yes I suppose that's one way of attempting to create and maintain equal opportunities. What about the polite bigots though? The ones that keep their actual discrimination inside their heads and construct other excuses in parallel for why they won't hire someone of a demographic they dislike.

It's actually extremely hard to do anything to influence equality of opportunity one way or another. I'll be honest with you; I've been somewhat playing devil's advocate in this thread. Up to a point, I agree with you that these demographic classifications shouldn't be relevant. Still, they're relevant to the discriminating bigots because of aspects of the past culture they grew up in. It takes time for cultural preconceptions to change.

If you believe in individual justice, then a "wage gap" that appears only as an aggregate, statistical generalization based on a very narrow set of measures, and one that neatly disappears when you start to control for different people having different values and pursuing different goals, then you don't see it as a problem.

But as I said earlier, "social justice" is not the same thing at all. So if you view everything with this lens of collectivism, it doesn't matter that no individual was harmed, it's intolerable that those greens, I mean blues, I mean males, got more than their fair share.

It's hard for leaders that preside over thousands or tens of millions of people to assess the well-being of that population without invoking some collective statistics. Yes, they often try to talk and listen to individuals too but when populations get that large statistics become a tool to make the problems knowable. And as we've already said there are plenty of bigots that do treat people of different statistical cohorts differently. Sometimes the discrimination even seems somewhat rational and is tolerated, for example risk assessments by insurance companies.

By the way, I'm curious at precisely what point you feel opportunity turns into outcome. Clearly pay would come under outcome. But my example of someone being born into a wealthy family, are they inheriting opportunities or outcomes? Does every opportunity arise from someone else's outcome (or a past outcome for the same person)?

If you introduce a little bit of inheritance tax, are you taxing unequal outcome or unequal opportunity?