ROBIN HANSON: Gender And Status:

I agree that men are over-represented in the high tail of status, but this seems to me less due to women being associated with children, and more to men just having higher variance, which seems a consistent pattern. Men also seem to be over-represented at the low tail of status, a fact that will matter more to low status people, but less to the high status folks who dominate these discussions.

I’m happy to join Perry in trying to raise the status of mothers, in part because that could help promote higher fertility. But I’m not sure how much we can really control this. If status is a shared judgment on individual virtue, and if men actually do have higher variance in virtuous features, with the two genders typically having similar medians, then top men really do deserve their overall top status. Just as bottom men deserve their overall bottom status.

All I know is that we hear a lot more about the imbalance between male and female CEOs, and not much at all about the difference between male and female homeless, or prison inmates.