> So to sum it up, in my view we don't live in a meritocracy right now, because a meritocracy would produce closer to a 50/50 representation of men and women in the board room.

Grendel has a point here. There's no way a perfect equal-opportunity society would lead to a 50-50 split. It's unreasonable enough to say this to qualify you as "that kind of feminist".

If you want we can talk about this, but it would be more productive it you would look for the facts yourself. There is research that shows that in this kind of discussions the more arguments the other party offers, the more convinced people become they are right. But just in case it helps:

- men and women have different _preferences_. Not capabilities, research actually goes towards almost identical capabilities, but they want wildly different things from life. Of course, you can go and say it's society's blame that people are different, which is another can of worms I'm not really keen to open, but fact is - they do want different things. So they make different choices. And men's choices tend to lead to the boardroom more often than women's. Now you could go and say that's nor right and "educate" both men and women and teach them what to want - personally I don't find this idea particularly attractive - but we're talking current facts here.

- and speaking of preferences, women have children. There is absolutely no way you can say equal opportunity would lead to 50-50 split, when women have the children. Again, I'm not saying about how society might "fix" this "problem" - again I see it as a preference issue and as a matter of principle I don't think that it's a good idea to have the society teach people what to want. But fact is, women get pregnant and tend to want to bond and raise their children at least for a while, which on average HAS to have some impact on final performance.

So you see, you are "that kind of feminist", looking beyond reason toward an ideal and trying to twist the facts to fit that ideal. I really wouldn't want to be in your shoes right now, having to chose between accepting this truth and finding some shred of maybe falsehood in the other guy's comment and convincing myself that it makes the whole argument invalid.