Now you're getting into a touchier issue and making a very large assumption, I suspect without even realizing it. By suggesting that there is a problem you're i

Now you're getting into a touchier issue and making a very large assumption, I suspect without even realizing it. By suggesting that there is a problem you're indicating a belief that you believe all people are roughly identical. As I imagine you may be doing, let's avoid touchier issues and talk about height -- my examples were not off the cuff. It's extremely difficult to try to objectively measure the competence of an individual in general, but IQ does tend to provide a workable measurement that does tend to be quite predictive and map well to aggregate performance in 'mental' fields. But we're talking about height, so why am I bringing this up? As counter intuitive as it is, height correlates strongly with IQ. We could discuss the possible reasons for this (environmental? sexual selection? shared genetic markers? something else?) but the point is that this is not disputed. Here [1][2] are a couple of sources if you were not aware of this. You can find countless more on google scholar searching for 'height iq correlation'. But this raises the issue that not only do tall people earn more than short people, but that it's highly likely that companies paying more to tall people are indeed working in their, and society's, best interest. The long and short here is that you cannot assume differences are a result of irrational decisions. So you're left to try to argue that short people bring something to table that's valuable but less visible than their individual competence (at least in so much as IQ is reflective of that). This could be true, but I think that there's scant evidence for such. The first issue you'd need to overcome is the existential case. And I find the way most people try to do this is by getting back to assuming discrimination, yet now you're stuck in circular logic or having to assume your conclusion. 'All people are equal. What about these vast quantities of data showing substantial differences from ostensibly objective assessments? It's caused by environmental issues and discrimination. Why do you think that? Well because it doesn't show all people being equal!' And to be clear, everything I'm saying above applies to people considered as groups - not individuals. Einstein, for instance, was about 5'7". It just means there are different distributions among different groups, and so when you consider these groups as a whole you'd expect to see these different distributions reflected. [1] - http://journals.plos.org/plosgenetics/article?id=10.1371/journal.pgen.1003451 http://journals.plos.org/plosgenetics/article?id=10.1371/jou... [2] - https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1053811911010251 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S105381191...