I consider myself to be fortunate to always have had smart, strong women around me in family and friends. Professionally, especially in my field, I think I'm right in the middle of a real, meaningful change. Some of the best people I work with are women - this should not be a surprise or even noteworthy (as some of you already pointed out), but motorsport tends to be pretty old school even among various engineering disciplines. We have just as many women in technical and hands-on roles as we do in the design office, and clearly they are some of the best in the world
Linked below is Mercedes F1 team's report on gender pay gap in 2017. As pointed out, the real reason behind this seemingly shocking gap is that, simply not enough women have made it into the top level roles, yet. I work with someone who is the same age as my "baby" sister (who herself is doing quite well in finance in NY), who is very smart, talented and capable. I've no doubt, other than the few years' extra experience I have, she is a better engineer than I am, and I see no objective reason why she couldn't make it all the way to the top.
https://www.mercedesamgf1.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2018/03/Gender-Pay-Report-2017.pdf
In my previous team, we had a female mechanic, again quite young and just starting out in her career. Not exactly a shiny fingernails-type person - at various times her legs were completely covered with bruises and burns from doing brake/damper change practices on WRC cars (it's damn impressive if you ever get to watch in person). Towards the end of my time there we had a long chat, and I found out that she was considering leaving this "dream" job of being a rally mechanic. Apparently, the #1 mechanics straight up told the team manager that they wouldn't have her in their crews because, well, she's a girl. It's actually quite a toxic, macho environment, far worse than I've seen elsewhere really. To put things in perspective, they kept certain mechanics in their crew who made repeat mistakes which resulted in multiple DNF's, but apparently she was not good enough. This really made me angry and disappointed in my colleagues who I thought were quite decent people up to that point. She has since moved on to different world championship teams, and I hope I can work with her again in the future.
Regarding #18 in the post above; I have no problem being the "feminist knight" because the world at large (and as exemplified here by a few, evidently) still discriminates against them for simply being women. Sure, it's not right that they should get any preferential treatment if they are in fact rubbish at whatever it is they're supposed to be doing. But all things being equal, it's never equal for them, is it? I'll happily to do my part to try and fix that.
PS poking around this "Return of Kings" website a bit, I was really hoping that it was The Onion sort of satire website, because otherwise the level of misogyny on display there is, well, just sad. Unfortunately I don't think it is meant to be tongue in cheek. God bless you.