So I'll preface my opinion with the fact that we're both putting words into some dudes mouth.
When he or anyone else says that we should promote women, it's not saying that we should promote incompetent women. It's saying we should promote women who deserve it by challenging our biases. Take as an example orchestra auditions; when orchestras move to blind auditions the gender ratios for top positions suddenly become much more representative of the actual population. Since we do not have the luxury of blind auditions, we have to challenge ourselves to lean more on objective measures, as well as questioning our subjective measures that (unknowingly) take gender into account.
And maybe you're right; maybe women have less interest in science than men. The problem is we'll never actually know because society tells children, teens, and adults that women don't like math and men don't like nursing. So the best mechanism we have is encouraging women and men that the status quo is arbitrary, which involves having events focused on women in tech and working to promote women who deserve to be promoted so that there is an alternate narrative. Because that narrative has just as much validity (and in my opinion much more so) as the narrative that women just don't like science.
When he or anyone else says that we should promote women, it's not saying that we should promote incompetent women. It's saying we should promote women who deserve it by challenging our biases. Take as an example orchestra auditions; when orchestras move to blind auditions the gender ratios for top positions suddenly become much more representative of the actual population. Since we do not have the luxury of blind auditions, we have to challenge ourselves to lean more on objective measures, as well as questioning our subjective measures that (unknowingly) take gender into account.
And maybe you're right; maybe women have less interest in science than men. The problem is we'll never actually know because society tells children, teens, and adults that women don't like math and men don't like nursing. So the best mechanism we have is encouraging women and men that the status quo is arbitrary, which involves having events focused on women in tech and working to promote women who deserve to be promoted so that there is an alternate narrative. Because that narrative has just as much validity (and in my opinion much more so) as the narrative that women just don't like science.