I think I have settled enough for myself of a coherent theory of gender that I can read other people's ideas, however blatantly and intentionally offensive, and assess them reasonably. Does gender have much to do with my thesis? Not directly. Rent is due to the differences in production costs or productivities of things all operating within the same system. On a very brief timescale gender can operate as this sort of relation, for instance in a place like China, where modernization is accelerated and both genders are expected to work in factories and science/technology positions, and in modern business models, if women were traditionally socialized to be further from the new ideal than men were, then it would cost more to bring women up to speed relative to the cost for retraining the men, This would be a cost that could be assessed by using variations on rent models, but in general gender issues are not this simple or of this pattern.
One criticism of using rent concepts to discuss gender, which I consider pretty weak, is that it uses a cold mathematical construct from with paternalistic knowledge, from economics in particular, to try to discuss something which involves emotions and experiences at an individual level, beyond the reach of economic modeling. It could, indeed, be misused such that this would be good criticism. But using a mathematical model correctly, as a tool to understand the relationships between things, is no more wrong than using a hammer to nail a bench together.
The problem with rent being applied to gender where it is less homogenized than the China example above is that there is no single standard of productivity or value against which all people are measured, and no homogeneous group of 'women' or 'men' to compare. Human beings vary in enough details that the things we might wish to calculate are more likely to run on a continuous distribution, with the male and female mean, mode and average shifting only slightly relative to the overall values. But, underneath the idea of using rent in social and political theory lies the idea of considering the mathematical shapes of systems as they compare across fields. I still want to try mapping chemistry equations against social behaviors like voting, or the matrix and differential equations from parts of ecology mapped against multiculturalism. The importance here is pattern. The details matter, of course, but there are equations with some degree of success in describing complex events in the 'hard' sciences that could be mapped into social systems as well, to get at the underlying dynamics of societies. Would this be useful? At one point many of the physics concept demonstrations were mostly considered cheap parlor tricks, not really of much use, and not worthy of much funding outside the ivory tower of academia. Those demonstrations and the physics behind them lie at the foundation of our whole modern high-tech world. I doubt a computer will ever regulate society any more than a computer really regulates the Internet. Big complex systems have too many complex dynamics, generating emergent systems and all sort of odd singularities, so that for a species as stubborn and vain as humans, there may always be too much going on for a computer to manage. Being able, though, to discover more completely how stable peaceful governments become established might help improve the lives of millions of people, and figuring out how to successfully address the growing population of pets in the US might help prevent the millions of cats and dogs and other animals killed or abandoned to die each year as excess pets. These are the sorts of dynamics where math is a tool our species would be foolish not to utilize.
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