In my profession it is becoming predominantly female. If I was to advertise an all male study group, or limit an event to 50 percent fem
ale, I would be called exclusionary or sexist I feel.
I just googled male vs. female percentages of UK doctors. Looks like the ratio is roughly 40% female to 60% male. In what alternate reality is that "predominantly female"? This whole save-the-men hysteria is getting out of hand.
In my cohort of 12 individuals, 4 are male. This is not unusual unless you do surgery.
"Looking at the figures shows that the picture is unambiguous. Not only are women doctors to outnumber their male counterparts in the UK by 2017, in general practice this will happen in the next four years. Entry data from medical schools show that over the past four decades the number of men entering medicine has doubled whereas the number of women has increased 10-fold."
Merit has little to do with social choices, though. Just look at how often "cultural fit" comes up in discussions of hiring.
You are imagining an idealized utopia. The problem is, we don't live there. Unless hiring is done purely through objective tests that have been tested for bias and normalized there will be social-status factors involved. Coping with those lets us get much closer to a merit-based world than pretending they don't exist.
Imagine you had some code but a system-level round function was broken: it rounded up on 4-9 and down on 0-3. You can't change the function without changing the entire operating system. Would the best approach be to say, "I don't think we should discriminate! Round functions should behave correctly!"? Or would it be to compensate for the known flaws while working to change the system-level issues?