One did walk away, because she was disgusted with being used.

Part of the point of an egalitarian system is the idea that inherent potential is not a thing. Not to any significant degree, at any rate. This argument runs directly counter to the underlying philosophy on which your basic thesis depends.

That's ~51% at birth. It doesn't stay that way for all that long, due to another factor that hasn't been completely explained: women tend to live a bit longer than men do. This phenomenon spent most of history being masked by the fact that childbirth is much more dangerous in humans than in most species: until around the turn of the 20th century, it was the #1 cause of death among women in most cultures, and that skewed female life expectancy much lower than today. In the modern developed world, childbirth is a much safer process; it's still not completely devoid of dangers, but as it has receded as a killer of women, their life expectancy has not only caught up to men's but actually eclipsed it. There are places in the developing world where this process hasn't yet completed, but even there we can see improvements along similar lines.

The end result is that the population spends most of the human lifespan close to 50/50. At the high end of the age range it skews female, though this doesn't become significant until quite late in life.

Is there a chance? Of course there is.

Is there a good chance? I'm not convinced that there is. A person's life is a complex thing, and the advantages and disadvantages we face interact in extremely complex and sometimes completely counterintuitive ways. For one candidate, things may very well work out as you say: without the disadvantage, the character could do better. Another candidate may use the relative freedom from disadvantage in other ways, unrelated to the task at hand, resulting in a candidate who is very different from the one in question, but not particularly better or worse. There is a third possibility: you seem to imply that those who actually don't face these sorts of disadvantages essentially rest on their laurels, but if they do, then we must also entertain the possibility that a currently-disadvantaged candidate, if he or she were not to have faced these disadvantages, may have done the same, resulting in a candidate who is once again not particularly better, and perhaps even worse.

There is no way to predict what a candidate might have done if they had not faced disadvantages. Because of this, the question has no meaning, and should not be considered in hiring decisions. We must act based on what is in front of us, not on what might have been.

It might, in a parallel timeline where the disadvantage did not in fact apply. But we cannot gamble on parallel timelines; we can only go by what is real, in history as we know it. And by that history, you have two equal candidates.

There are no "rape charges". Never were. He's wanted, by order of a single right-wing prosecutor which our intel boys carefully selected, to answer questions about not using a condom once during a threesome - a session be conducted only on a particular spot next to a convenient airport for the US to snatch him up and drag him to a kangaroo trial wherever they care to hold one. If they even bother to charge him. They refuse to ask the questions anywhere but where the US can snatch him. For this he's been in a single room in an embassy for half a decade while the Brits spend millions of pounds to watch the doors, at the behest of the English-speaking intelligence nations little club. The fact that he exposed their crimes seems to be a bit pertinent. They're the charged, and convicted, and yet they have the guns ready to shoot him. No one is waiting for them to leave their holes.

BTW, one of the women has departed this "case" in disgust, because she figured out she's being used by the US. What Assange did, if he did it, was to not use a condom during a night of three-way sex. They said. It's a crime only in that country; nowhere else in the world can this "crime" be charged. And the "crime" isn't rape. Let's put it out there: US intelligence used its NSA superpowers to track down every woman Assange ever slept with, contacted them, and twiggled and wiggled until they found something, somewhere, to start an investigation on territory they could use to grab him. Even then, they had to shop until they found a rightwinger that hated him enough to start the process. Other prosecutors had refused to gin up a crime. Simultaneously they used their widespread network of tame journalists and news companies to spread the "rape" accusation far and wide, to destroy his credibility and blacken his name. And as the HB Gary emails showed, there is software sold by HB Gary and others used by people employed by corporations and the government to set up networks of fake personas to splatter newsgroups such as this with horseshit that they want to promulgate. Truth may just be getting its shoes on while lies run around the world, but now they have paid groups of fake people shooting the truth before it gets out the goddamned door.

Absolutely. The ends do not justify the means.

To which the answer will inevitably be yes. This is the basic cycle of history.

Or (C) implement practices which do not bias based on gender, thus putting everyone on the same (i.e. equal) playing field, and allow an equal gender mix to emerge. Or not, which would indicate that further study into the problem is needed. Tainting the results with misguided engineering to achieve a desired aesthetic never ends well.

Robot cars won't need them. Are you against progress, grandpa?

Crayola needs to make a crayon color called Indoor White Boy.

I think I may have responsed to the wrong post. Abject apologies.

Don't worry, a billion self-driven cars will never make an error. We've thought of everything. Because that's how engineering works. No errors, all the time. Unless it's turning a corner or something--

I read the article. What I mostly took away is this: genetic disorders are about to become repairable as a matter of routine injections, in an increasing number of cases. We took a ten year detour because of Bush and his fetal position, and that idiot pair of parents who sued a research line into a ten year hiatus and ruined one of the best researchers in the world. But it's coming back. Stupidity can stop this only so long, it seems. The age of wonders is coming. We need this hope, as so much else is being ruined that we can do nothing about.

The 20th century has been repealed. It's over. Back to kings, merchant princes, and ghostly immortal power structures.
Kind of glad I'll be dead soon.

Greenish-purple. The colour of magic.

Ah, Fox News. Incapable of detecting humor. Especially when you're the joke.

The future is finally coming. Damn.

Here's a thought: would it work on dogs? We could test it by color coding the box with food in it, figuratively or literally.