If I had downvoted it, it would be because I can't really imagine reading "Who would compensate them?" and responding "Can you define 'who'?" as a serious attempt at communication.

Not sure if serious. Just in case you are, however: 'them' is referring to the people doing financially unrecompensed work in the home. 'it' is the financially unrecompensed work in the home. 'Who' and 'Whose' are up to you to define - that's why they're phrased as questions, dontcha know.

financially unrecompensed work in the home

Who would compensate them? Whose benefit is it for?

Ok: let's suppose he intended the primary definition of innocuous, "not harmful." If a choice is made voluntarily, then by the assumption of revealed preferences it is the least 'harmful.' If we forced women to choose with the same distribution that men do, then on net women would be worse off- i.e. harmed by our force.

It seems incontestable to me that distributions of values are different for men and women. If values are different, choices will be different, and that is optimal.

Sexual dimorphism?

(One specific example: women have ovaries, men have testes. Both organs release mind-affecting hormones, in different distributions.)

What would be the context of the comment, and what sense of "equal" is implied?

For instance, I probably wouldn't object to someone saying "men and women are equal" if it was clear from the context that they meant "men and women should have equal rights". On the other hand, there are a variety of well-documented statistical differences between men and women, and trying to deny some of those might be harmful.

E.g. I've often heard it claimed that the difference in average pay between women and men is mostly attributable to differences in ambition and time voluntarily spent at home with children. I haven't looked at the matter enough to know if this is true. But if it is, then denying any population-level differences between men and women seems harmful, because it implies that something that actually has an innocuous explanation is because of discrimination.

I'd really like to know some basic, repeatable exercises that build empathy and social skills. Changing your everyday behavior to incorporate little bits of training here and there is not very effective. It's like wanting to get fit and deciding to walk a little faster whenever you need to get somewhere, instead of joining the gym. Or wanting to be a musician and deciding to hum along to songs more often, instead of getting a tutor.

While most rationalists would happily and quickly plan [...], anecdotally many seem hesitant or even hostile to the idea of using fashion as a tool to achieve their objectives.

This point is essentially the point of having your article here on LW, but it is not emphasized strongly enough, in my opinion.

Additionally, I think the point that "the tool of fashion is one you are using to convey some information, whether you intend a message or not" is an essential point that I did not see in your text.

I'm not sure what you're getting at here by binding "feelings" and "response"; I think our terminology is getting confused.

I'll clarify my earlier comment by saying that when it comes to figuring out if something is an entity which I should behave morally towards, I'm only really interested in conscious feelings. Response to stimuli alone, without conscious experience, shouldn't have any moral weight. And inversely, if something can consciously experience pain but is unable to respond to it, it is immoral to hurt it.

And some of these feelings (like bio-communication in plants), while measurable, we usually don't care that much about[...]

I'd argue that bio-communication in plants is probably not any actual kind of feeling or qualia. This is what I meant when I referred to neurologists; currently science has a fair (though vague) idea as to what sort of structure enables human feelings and experiences. When we don't detect this structure or anything analogous to it, we can be pretty confident that there's no consciousness/qualia/nameless-redness/etc. going on. Not extremely confident, as we don't understand consciousness well enough yet to be able to eliminate possible alternate implementations which don't resemble the known ones, but still fairly confident.