There's a lot of wisdom in your list, but I would take issue with the men/women point, that one is a bit of a straw man. No one reasonable is advocating for a mandated perfect 50/50 split.
The reasonable take on gender equality is to remove the social obstacles that prevent sufficiently motivated women from climbing to the top of the corporate ladder, or sufficiently motivated men from committing themselves to nurturing their families, as one example. Gender equality is simply the expansion of choice via elimination of constraints generated by too-rigid gender identities.
Laws requiring 30% of election candidates be women? check.
University quotas? Check.
Arguments about "not enough women in <insert random profession here>" because it is not 50% split? Check.
I guess your "No one reasonable is advocating for a mandated perfect 50/50 split." phrase is true, specially the reasonable part, it seems most politicians are unreasonable.
The quotas are not motivated by a desire to force a perfect split. Rather, they're attempting to correct a current imbalance create by past and present sexism. I agree that it's a blunt and sloppy instrument. Of course it would be better to attack the root cause and eliminate sexism, and then any imbalances would be perfectly acceptable. If only we could figure out how.
Your numbers might improve, but there is a change if you don't find good candidates, you have to fill them in with bad candidates. This could make things worse in the long term because all those poor candidates results in a reinforcement of the assumptions that men are better at <insert job>.
Except for politics, can't be bad at having an opinion ;) Or jobs that any human should be able to perform.
Like I said, blunt, sloppy instrument with many unintended consequences, and the one you're pointing out is a big concern. That's why replacing quotas with many smaller gentler "nudges" may be preferable.
Whenever I read something like this, I have one question:
If this is how you believe the world is and it cannot be changed... why the hell do you want to live in it? Why do you care about it? Why do you promote its principles?
The reasonable take on gender equality is to remove the social obstacles that prevent sufficiently motivated women from climbing to the top of the corporate ladder, or sufficiently motivated men from committing themselves to nurturing their families, as one example. Gender equality is simply the expansion of choice via elimination of constraints generated by too-rigid gender identities.