It was ALWAYS just a small group of men. The group of men doing the ruling is the largest and most distributed in history.
And yet they obviously did get elected and had real power. "Men rule the world" as a serious statement is obviously nonsense and it's so easy to disprove I'm amazed that it was even claimed, unless it's with the modern sociological twist of "power is male, therefore these women were men while in power" and similar attempts to destroy all capability of language transporting information.
How so ?
In practice, this meant that men who didn't go to Ivys, MIT, Stanford, and other top colleges didn't even get interviewed. Most women were interviewed, and they got multiple chances to pass interviews. The end result of this system is that elite men were hired exclusively, while women of various classes were hired.
I don't think this was some moustache-twirlingly evil plot to exclude non elite men. I think leadership just responding to pressure to increase the share of women, and the end result was this set of double standards. The end result of mandating a specific percent of women is that companies get more selective when choosing men.
And FWIW, most women didn't like this situation. I'd say at most 1/3rd were supportive of these practices. The double standards were open secrets, and many women worried that this would affect perceptions of competence. Especially when equal promotion rates were also enforced. Since now you have a double standard at hiring and both groups were guaranteed equal numbers of promotions, which inevitably led to different standards in promotions too.
Her opinion is that men have co-opted and subverted feminism to ironically increase exploitation of women.