Terrible idea
"we will need a long period – at least a generation – where women are favoured over men for funding and promotion"
Straightforward positive discrimination a terrible idea. The best way to deal with people of one gender thinking people in another only got the job because they were in another gender person isn't to make the prejudiced people correct. And of course by rejecting talented members of the one gender for less talented members of another you are ensuring your company doesn't get the best talent and performs worse.
(I'm using "gender" in the middle english sense of "kind", "type", or "sort" here, because the same applies whatever group you are discriminating in favour of.)
There are ways to deal with inequality that don't have this drawback, or the problem of illegal discrimination
- employ the best people - if you do this the talent pool available to your company is bigger than the talent pool available to a hidebound competitor that still thinks that "those people aren't right for this type of work". Outcompete them, prove them wrong, and rejoice.
- remove identifying information from CVs/whatever before passing them to the potentially prejudiced person in charge of hiring. This has been shown to work in blind auditions for orchestras
- if you must mandate something, mandate interviews not outcomes - since the NFL mandated that at least one non-white candidate must be considered for a head coach job the diversity of head coaches has increased, but nobody got the job because of their race.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
