You're assuming that the only reason that women do not enter the industry is because they do not have the aptitude or ability, which is just plain false. This event isn't about saying, girls do this because we need more of you, it's saying, girls do this, because society suffers as a result of gender stereotypes. Having an event to counter society's flaws is not the same as having an event to artificially manipulate the perceived quality of the attendees.

Also, your second paragraph makes little to no sense. The event is not going to persuade women to enter the software development industry because of some irrational reason (maybe you could actually say what reasons you think the event promotes?), it's there to reduce the effect of our culture on people who want to get into software development. No one is handing people who attend this a free pass to getting a job in the industry; ability does still matter.

And also, I did not say that .5 is the goal, but moving towards that would be a step in the right direction. I looked up the male to female ratio of a random university course (UCL Computer Science). The ratio there was 77:23 male:female. That's quite a long way off 0.5. And before you say I am putting equality before ability, ability doesn't come from nowhere. While software development continues to be so male dominated, or at least, seen as a male career by society at large, we will exclude god knows how many brilliant people from the youngest ages. Having outreach programs is _not_ a bad thing, and to think otherwise is to be ignorant of one's privilege.