Your second paragraph seems to be agreeing with the first of my parenthetical points, but it sounds as if it's intended to be a point of disagreement. I mention this just in case it turns out that one of us has misunderstood the other.
Unjustified lawsuits are probably cheaper -- you're more likely to win them, more likely to win them quickly, and more likely (in jurisdictions where this is a real distinction) to have the plaintiff have to pay your legal costs.
Your second paragraph seems to be agreeing with the first of my parenthetical points, but it sounds as if it's intended to be a point of disagreement.
It was disagreeing with your second point, "much too rare for rational consideration of their risk to yield the reported difference in evaluation". If the person is risk-averse, then it's not too rare for rational consideration of the risk to yield the difference. (Don't assume that risk aversion is inherently iirational. It's not.)
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.