This type of discrimination has a name, it’s called “affirmative action”. This argument that fixing an imbalance is discrimination and therefore somehow worse seems to be really common but I think it’s a little misguided to say we shouldn’t use it, and here’s why.
The imbalance we have is an imbalance that was caused by cultural discrimination against women, and it’s a type of discrimination that is often unseen and is hard and time consuming to fix. (Not to mention, nobody actually knows how.)
The idea for affirmative action is to provide a counter-acting force to the already existing discrimination. Furthermore, the idea is to use this force gently and, most importantly, temporarily, until some balance is restored.
We already know what happens if we take no action at all: we get discrimination against women. The industry used to be a much higher percentage of women 40 years ago. Why has it declined? It’s obviously cultural because it used to be higher in the recent past, and just before that it was near zero and women weren’t allowed to vote. The numbers have been swinging all over the map in just 100 years, so it clearly has not settled from the perspective of history.
So what would you do to fix an imbalance? What is your suggestion? Doing nothing already has a known, negative outcome. There are other ideas besides affirmative action. How well have they worked in the past?