I'm very unfamiliar with gnome as an organization. What are the political reasons you're referencing?
And apart from the 5 years since: it seems the problems were administrative, having nothing to do with the actual content of the program?
Any other problems in your life that’d easily go away if only these women weren’t meddling?
* Your opinion, not mine.
The outreach program is political, and is rather discriminatory and sexist.
Giving applicants preference for having some blessed sex or political leanings is generally a recipe for disaster.
That is the bank robbery: these groups were robbed of opportunity.
The remedial measures are programs such as the one discussed here, or affirmative action for college admission.
That is "taking the money from the robber, and giving it back to the bank".
The analogy is that the last action does fit your everyday definition of something bad: you are not supposed to take a bag of money from someone against their will. You are not supposed to make employment or acceptance decicions based on sex or race.
Yet, quite obviously, it's stupid to look at those actions in isolation. You have to zoom out, and you'll see: it wasn't his money in the beginning.
That's the analogy, just in case your ignorance was genuine.
I mean, that is technically theft. It's just very obviously justified theft in response to a previous theft (assuming you prove beyond a reasonable doubt that it is in fact the bank robber from whom you're taking the money).
...but that's really not the point here, is it?
Curiously, Wiktionary has a different definition: "The act of stealing property". "Property" in turn has a lot of different definitions, the first being "Something that is owned". Relevantly, neither definition specifies by whom the property is owned; as long as it's someone's property, stealing it is technically "theft" under this sort of broad definition.
Merriam-Webster seems to agree more with you than it does with me ("[...] the felonious taking and removing of personal property with intent to deprive the rightful owner of it" / "an unlawful taking [...] of property"), while Dictionary.com seems to be similarly vague ("the act of stealing", though this is lumped in with "the wrongful taking and carrying away of the personal goods or property of another" and "larceny").