Could some of this be resolved through technology?
Imagine a voting system which takes into account the gender of the person voting, as well as the gender of the person viewing the page. A woman reader's view might place higher value on women's votes, relative to men's, such that maybe a single downvote from another woman will count much farther towards making a comment invisible than several upvotes from a men.
(with maybe a twiddle somewhere that says something like "show me the men's view" "show me the women's view" "show me both views, highlighting differences" "show me both views, ignoring differences")
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Its an interesting study but I don't think it proves your point. Wealthy people out bred poor people in a span of 10 generations in England. But I have no particular reason to think that the reason the rich outlived the poor was their ability to read. Access to better food, more sanitary living, less stress all indicate higher survival rates. Its not surprising the the children of the wealthy were more likely to survive into adulthood.
Now maybe we think the rich were better readers to begin with and the gene spread that way. But we have no particular reason to believe this either- or rather we might have reason to believe the rich were better readers but we have no reason to believe this advantage was genetic.
Agreed. Furthermore, I think that we should consider the fact that even if there was significant selection pressure for the ability to be literate (I would argue that this is most likely not the case) that there is insufficient evidence that this pressure could result in a significant social difference so quickly.
Furthermore, the converse appears to be currently true: the more educated a women is (I would assume this relates to reading comprehension, although not necessarily so) the expected number of children she will have generally decreases (http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/06/25/educated-women-opting-for-motherhood/).