If you want organizations to be merit-based, you need the larger social context to be merit based, so as to provide a 'background of fairness' to establish what is right or wrong for an organization. To do this, you have to take actions that drive wider social change, not simply optimize your organization.

(If you optimize at the organization level, you end up taking advantage of existing social biases, which is why those subcultures are heavily dominated by the male majority.)To fix this, organizations must not optimize within the existing social biases, but attempt to shift the social biases to that their optimizations are aligned with a merit based-society.

In other words, if you want to hit your target, you have to account for gravity and aim up a little.