you're assigning a high predictive ability to academic performance, while I don't even assign it a very high correlation.
Academic performance is one of the things known to the faculty (and the same between the "male" and "female" conditions); it is not the only one. The relevant question is: How much predictive power does the totality of the information provided have, and conditioned on that how much predictive power does the sex of the applicant have? It looks to me as if the answers, on any account of sex differences that I find credible, are "quite a bit" and "scarcely any".
By "academic performance" I was referring to all of these bullet points:
- what degree a person got from what institution
- what their grade point average was
- what their GRE scores are
- what was written about them by a faculty member writing a letter of recommendation
Which (from your summary) I understand is pretty much all of the information in the application letter.
I'm not claiming that sex differences have predictive power; I'm claiming that academic performance doesn't have as much power as we'd like and recruiters have to look for more info.
I remember seeing a talk of the concept of privilege show up in the discussion thread on contrarian views.
Some discussion got started from "Feminism is a good thing. Privilege is real."
This is an article that presents some of those ideas in a way that might be approachable for LW.
http://curt-rice.com/quotas-microaggression-and-meritocracy/
One of the ideas I take out of this is that these issues can be examined as the result of unconscious cognitive bias. IE sexism isn't the result of any conscious thought, but can be the result as a failure mode where we don't rationality correctly in these social situations.
Of course a broad view of these issues exist, and many people have different ways of looking at these issues, but I think it would be good to focus on the case presented in this article rather than your other associations.