This will and already is undermining credibility of women who got into science through their own merit.
Not really, just money: unfortunately, women don't have some magical sciencey abilities that make them outperform men. The thing with work is that it is sex-agnostic; whether the grunts^W PhD students collecting data, the penpushers^W profs. filling grant applications and the slaves^W postdocs computing stuff have a vagina or a penis, the whole machine will still go forward.
You can e.g. compare the the US and the USSR/Russia; having the first woman in space and, generally, much more women in science, didn't make them scientifically dominate the West.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/soviet-russia-had-...
https://shethoughtit.ilcml.com/essay/comrades-in-science-wom...
https://www.bbc.com/news/business-39579321
> basically half the population is not pursuing science
That would only be true if the number of tenure tracks/stipends/grants/... were increasing in parallel. The only thing happening now is that the proportion of women is increasing, not necessarily the “science output”.
Results will differ, even if the same subject is studied because all science is self-exploration.
Says someone who never opened a biology textbook.
> The sexes' motivations and perspectives are almost alien to one another.
Because you really think that the M/F dichotomy is a peculiarity of the human species and has not been deeply studied in many other species?
I agree though that quotas will not increase output at all. There are limiting factors that reach far beyond gender and of course they did not have quotas, nor did they treat women better than in the west. Expectations were different but people not having to work was obviously seen as a luxury possible through productivity.
The problem mostly is that there is no interest from women to join male dominated natural sciences - most of those that excell are loners. But, anyway - as a male with IT background I assure, that many guys would not mind, if there were even more women studying. I had probably rare chance of working in a job, where all my colegues were women, who were writing software... it would be very insulting to them and me to know that they had to study less to receive the same salary and job!!!
Ideologies seems to be a necessity for young and dumb people - so they can look back on their stupid mistakes when they will grow wiser(unless they don't), but since the fail of communism in USSR there seems to be not enough effort and brainwork involved to spread these ideologies with style and feeling of selfimportance and it all just relies on making opponents dumb with never ending BS, to compensate for something else.