Way back when, I'd applied for a position at a local university's geek-kids summer programme (I'm keeping this as non-specific as possible). I never heard back from them with an acceptance or rejection, until days before the programme started. 'You're in,' they said, and so my folks had to scramble to readjust our summer plans, arrange their finances to cover the program and so forth. Not really a big deal, but a bit of a nuisance.
What's the affirmative-action angle? Well, it turns out that I'd been on the alternates list because I'm a white guy, and the programme wanted more girls and non-whites. One of the accepted folks had cancelled, and so I got a spot after all.
It's not too much of an exaggeration to say that this programme changed my life. It opened my eyes to what eventually became my career. It exposed me to other high-schoolers like me. It made me friends I still have today. It still stands as one of my most formative experiences.
Now, in this programme there were some students who clearly didn't belong. They were fundamentally unprepared (i.e., they had never been taught the fundamentals of the material). They didn't understand the material. They cried because they were failing what was for everyone else and easy pass (literally, as in not even bothering to worry). They held the entire class back because the professors had to spend so much time trying—and, mostly, failing—to explain basic concepts to them. The programme was a waste of their time: they learned little, if anything, and had an utterly miserable experience.
They were, of course, uniformly non-white, non-Asian girls.
I'll pause here to note that none of this is an attack on those students qua people. I'm sure that they were perfectly good people, but they had no business at a university geek-kid programme.
I'll also note that there were plenty of young women in the programme who were quite capable and intelligent and did just as well as the young men. The poor students weren't poor students because they were female, or because they were non-white, but because they were unintelligent and/or uneducated.
Now, each spot once of those poor students occupied was a spot which could have been occupied by an excellent student. Each of those spots represented a young life which wasn't changed like mine was. Which of those students, unaccepted because of their gender or colour, dropped out of high school, never applied to college, committed suicide or majored in some non-technical field? How dare anyone think that's right?
So no, I don't think 'we dudes will be just fine.'