And why is positive discrimination justified? Why not lift all the fingers off the scales and see where things end up?
Who's suggesting positive discrimination? That would imply quotas or lowered standards, which are already deprecated approaches to the problem. Outreach and support are favored precisely because they're not zero-sum, and they're necessary because there are so many fingers on so many other scales. "Watch others discriminate and then do nothing" is not a solution.
To answer honestly; anything other than a 50/50 split prompts questions as to the cause of that discrepancy, and whether that cause involves unfairness (that would hurt both the individual and the organisation).
There's a lot of evidence for bias in both hiring and performance evaluation, so it's not unreasonable to look for those things in fields where the gender or racial split is skewed.
> And why is positive discrimination justified?
Your question assumes that the status quo is a level playing field, which is demonstrably not the case.
Positive discrimination is NOT a great solution, because it can create resentment/mistrust among those who feel threatened and feel that the "bar" is being lowered (it isn't). However it's a solution that's easier to administer than increasing merit through bias reduction, which can be quite labour intensive.
[Edit: gender 'or racial' split]
I suggest starting with the following jobs:
* garbage collectors
* butchers
* construction workers
* loggers
* fishermen
* miners
All these fields are heavily male-dominated. All of them are heavy jobs, some of them include challenging work environments. While many jobs need specific training, most of these fields allow beginners to gain experience on the job without having to spend a long time and a lot of money up-front.
If the reaction is "but women don't want to work in those fields" I'd like to know whether this is more important than the strive for 50/50. After all, many men work in fields they're not exactly enthusiastic about. They work there because those were the jobs which where available when (and, sometimes, where) they needed one.
An interesting observation can be made here: the more freedom people - man and women alike - have to choose where to work, the more the sexes differ in their choices [1]:
"Regression analyses explored the power of sex, gender equality, and their interaction to predict men's and women's 106 national trait means for each of the four traits. Only sex predicted means for all four traits, and sex predicted trait means much more strongly than did gender equality or the interaction between sex and gender equality. These results suggest that biological factors may contribute to sex differences in personality and that culture plays a negligible to small role in moderating sex differences in personality.". This study is cited in the first part of the Norwegian 'Hjernevask' documentary series [2], titled 'The Gender Equality Paradox' [3].
[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18712468
It's probably not useful to think in terms of goals - a 50/50 split might be an _ideal_, but clearly is not one that's ever very likely to be arithmetically real.
