> My government has been caught lying over and over “for the public good” during this pandemic, but also on topics like feminism.
I'm not familiar with what's been going in your country (France?), but I'd suggest some heavy citations to back up a lightning-rod statement like the above. It's particularly surprising from a country with a pretty good international reputation for press freedom. Were these "feminist lies" arguably innocent innumeracy / failing to perform multivariate regression?
> You need a citation for government lying to people?
When someone mixes in a vague accusation about the government lying for the benefit of a protected group, without citations, it's a bit of a warning sign. I totally believe governments lie, but citations always help credibility.
By the latter are you referring to the pay gap myth? If so it's well beyond innocent innumeracy because feminists have been doing univariate "analysis" to make false claims of pay discrimination since the 1980s, and people have been pointing out the need to do multivariate analysis for just as long. It doesn't make any difference, they still make exactly the same claims in exactly the same way no matter how often it gets debunked.
My best wild guess is that the GP is referring to univariate pay gap studies, but I'd like to do better than a wild guess.
My wife is in finance and accounting, and has a good friend who is a serial entrepreneur with several small businesses, employing a few more women than men. After one of these univariate statistics was quoted on the news, my wife (who professionally thinks about cost savings all day) asked me a question that boiled down to "Hey... it would be wrong and sexist of course... but could my friend save 5-10% on salaries by hiring nearly exclusively top-notch women?" That's when I explained univariate and multivariate regression, and why she should always be skeptical about any study that doesn't assign weights to multiple plausible factors.
There are still plenty of smart people out there who haven't heard about the flaws in some of these studies. Unfortunately, it's much easier to fit a narrative to an oversimplified problem with a simplistic solution. If only mean income were a good proxy for how effectively society helps people achieve fulfillment and life goals, fair governance would be much easier. Don't get me wrong. I believe governments should do more to help reduce constraints on women that impede their life goals and fulfillment, but it looks like mean hourly income isn't a great proxy for measuring progress in fulfillment.
Your wife is one thing and understandable because she's (presumably) not a full time feminist advocate. But I still routinely see this claim be made by e.g. journalists who have been writing about feminism their entire careers, or people who appear to be spending most of their time on such advocacy. Those people either know, or they are so dumb they never had the obvious thought that occurred immediately to your wife. I don't think they're dumb as they're normally quite eloquent, they just don't want to lose that powerful talking point.
I'm not familiar with what's been going in your country (France?), but I'd suggest some heavy citations to back up a lightning-rod statement like the above. It's particularly surprising from a country with a pretty good international reputation for press freedom. Were these "feminist lies" arguably innocent innumeracy / failing to perform multivariate regression?