This logic falls appart almost immediately. A couple immediate counter examples: Two candidates for job, one objectively brilliant but an arrogant SoB the other more modestly skilled but jells with our culture. I hire the second, and the first can take is "hard work" and beat it.

Two more candidates, one again is more technically qualified but the second grew up in a market Im targeting for expansion. Again, I take the second because the circumstances of his birth are worth more to me than difference in developed ability.

Every choice made is a combination of hundreds of culminating value judgements and to pretend that we can create some objective score based on merit is intellectually dishonest; to pretend that we want to ignore the other factors is unhealthy.

Thank you for that reply. I always favoured meritocracy, but im currently running into this "outside" world, the challenges the outside world poses are fascinating. People are so complicated, it should be a science.

This isn't a split second in time in a vacuum. There is a history and a future. The history is that males dominate the industry, and if we look further back, there is much more to the divide between the genders. The future hasn't been written, but if we want it to differ from the past, we have to make decisions that affect that.

In order for young girls (whether we're talking about children or just engineers early in their career path) to feel confident, to relate and feel like a natural part of the industry, there has to be a change. There has to be more females at conferences. There has to be more female leadership. If you continue to look only at a point of time (a result of history) and say "right now there are more men qualified then women" for every decision, you prevent a future where women had the same comfort and opportunity to truly level the playing field.