In short -- life happens but then the jobs dry up and good talent is over looked or lost.
And, yes, it does happen to women more than men.
If you are hiring for a senior development position and you have a filter you can employ that will cut out 90% of mediocre or bad programmers (or perhaps more importantly make it much easier to identify them), but will also cut out 40% of good and great programmers, it's not a foregone conclusion that you shouldn't employe that filter. If you still get enough resumes to make a decision, you've just decreased the odds that you get a shit hire by $MATH percent.
If social justice is something you care about you probably don't want to do this. If building good software is something you care about, you probably do. I think most here would agree that a random developer with a large body of public OSS contributions is probably "better" than a random developer without. I say that as someone who has pushed to a public GitHub repository probably four times in the past two years.
Affirmative action type programs are often discussed/implemented as bi-modal.
Okay I can pee standing up, but other than than?
Also whenever these kinds of arguments are made Asians are always counted as white, even though more Asians work in the tech sector than should by chance.
In this context the "privilege" is your normal. It's not some extra perk you consciously take, it's that you don't get some shit that happens to other people.
If your house is robbed you can call the police and not worry that they'll arrest or shoot you instead.
You can do your job with little fear that your boss will want to sleep with you and impede your career if you reject his advances.
You can use public toilets without causing uproar and/or breaking laws.
And you can be blissfully unaware that such things are real problems, because it either never happens to you, or happens rarely and on a smaller scale than for some marginalized people.
People asking you to mind your privilege don't want you to feel guilty. They want you to understand and believe that they have to deal with things that don't happen to you.
No I just have to fear that I say the wrong thing at a conference and lose my job.
>People asking you to mind your privilege don't want you to feel guilty
That is a lie.