@Cas: You believe that those who experience the ill-effects of discrimination are experts on it. Would you similarly agree, then, that victims of crime are the best people to decide on the punishment for the perpetrators, as is the case in a handful of societies?

Being a victim of something does not make a person an expert on it, nor does it necessarily put a person in the best position to counteract it.

I have a friend who feels that feminism is a complete waste of time and that – as a society – we were better off when women didn’t have many of the privileges they enjoy today. This friend is a woman. I think that she is wrong: but presumably, you’d value her opinion on the matter as being more valid than mine, because of her gender?

I don’t deny for a second that virtually all women will, in their lifetimes, experience more negative gender discrimination (and less positive gender discrimination) than virtually all men. I only dispute that:

(a) it necessarily follows that virtually all women are better than virtually all men at developing strategies to combat this gender discrimination: I suspect that I’d certainly do a better job at this task, for example, than the friend I mentioned earlier, and I’m no expert (note that on average, I would expect to find more female experts than male experts in this field – the difference is that I, unlike you, don’t assume somebody is or isn’t an expert based on their gender)

(b) it is valid to write off the contributions of anybody on any topic based solely on their gender

That you aren’t “forced” to see something doesn’t mean that you can’t be an expert on it, and just because you are “forced” to see it doesn’t mean that you are: it just adjusts the probabilities.

If you spend your life assuming expertise based on gender, then presumably when your computer breaks you ask for assistance from a man rather than a woman, because – statistically speaking – the man is more likely to be an expert (because there are more male professional IT folks than female ones).