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Madame -- I'm assuming based on what occurs to me as cattiness and barely-disguised passive-aggressive hysteria but lmk if I'm wrong -- this is a strawman.
Her argument is that if we just took the thumb off the scale and left things to meritocracy the system would balance itself out naturally. She's not positing an optimal number of women. She's saying that the women who belong would fit in and the ones who don't would fall out as a matter of course because Men and Women Who Get Things Done wouldn't be forced to put up with them.
More to the point, she's talking about the ones who behave the way you're behaving right now.
There is no hypocrisy here, only what occurs to me as an unfortunate lack of self-awareness on your part.
Yes, and what are the qualities of "women who fit in"? What are the number of women who would remain and the number of women who would be pushed out? If I'm planning the office Christmas party, I need to know "how many are coming?" and a vague answer like "the ones who will be fun will come, the wet blankets will stay at home" is no good. She wants to revise the current world of work and indeed society as a whole.
You need a plan for that, not just "oh well the Right People will show up".
(I feel it's particularly ironic that I'm doing the male virtue thing of asking for facts, figures, and concrete plans, while you all are doing the female virtue thing of feelings, relying on coincidence, and 'it'll all work out in the end').
But "it'll work itself out" is exactly how that kind of deregulated meritocracy is meant to work, and arguably works. In that context, positing or demanding quotas, as you seem to do, is trivially absurd.
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What would your argument be for why meritocratic hiring would be likely to prevent feminisation? Is it that the high-merit candidates are low on feminine traits, regardless of their gender?
(It seems meritocratic university entrance is leading to more women than men in many subjects, but perhaps those women are more masculine?)
To give an example of some of the stuff @TitaniumButterfly is talking about, here's the way the tertiary entrance rank worked in Victoria (where I live) when I was in year 12 (back in the oughties!).
You do four or more subjects, and get a score of 0-50 for each. Languages other than English (LotEs) get a +5 to their score; uni-level subjects get a +5 to their score. Then you add up your top four subjects' scores, and add on 10% of your fifth- and sixth-highest scores. So far, so good.
Except that English is required to be counted as one of your best four, and LotEs can count as one of the top four (and you can do more than one, for a theoretical maximum of +16) while uni-level subjects can't (and you can only do one of them, for a theoretical maximum of +0.5).
Guess what sex does better at English and other languages (my score for English was 15 points lower than the worst of my other six subjects*). Guess what sex is more likely to be doing uni-level science in year 12 (I'd have done two - physics and maths - if I could). Girls' best subjects are prioritised over boys' when calculating the TER, which means yes, you will wind up with more girls than boys qualifying for competitive uni positions, including science courses which have nothing to do with year 12 English (i.e. writing essays about Hamlet or the linguistic differences of Aboriginal English) or LotEs. This is not meritocracy - not, at least, when talking about sex disparities.
*Actually, I'm like 70-80% sure that I failed English outright (which doesn't count as a score at all, and means you can't graduate), but my English teacher fudged the paperwork. Not that it wasn't justified after the complete trainwreck my life was at that point, but this demonstrates even further how wide the gulf was between that and my other subjects.
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My understanding is that there are two main thrusts:
Masculinity in the workplace and other similar institutions like school has been banned to a great degree. This prevents men from competing on an even playing field.
Equivalent forms of femininity have not only not been banned, but are encouraged and given the legal power of law in many instances, which further tilts the field in those directions.
If we rectified the situation in either way, the argument is that the fields would sort themselves out in a fairly efficient manner.
As I said elsewhere, I find her diagnoses of the problem to be probably correct, but her overall conclusions and solutions underdeveloped.
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Generally yes if we consider part of 'merit' to be 'psychological compatibility with a competitive work environment.' I.e. able to participate in direct debate rather than shy away and seek consensus.
University is a bad joke at this point and partly for this reason. The rough IQ required to 'graduate university' now is lower than the rough IQ required to graduate high school a few decades ago; in that sense, at least, a university degree means less than a high school diploma did fairly recently.
Absurd feminized departments abound. I've seen published 'mathematics' papers that were substantially just the author talking about their feelings re: how hard they perceive being female (or black, etc.) in Math. History, psychology, genetics, pretty much anything outside of hard science has become infantilized, feminized, sanitized of female-triggering content. Why would men want to go into that? Why would we expect to do well in it? How could we respect ourselves while playing along?
I had no end of fighting with my professors over their ridiculous feminized/marxist positions when I was in college, and that was decades ago. At this point it's a massive humiliation ritual for men and especially white men. It's a tremendously-hostile environment and while some men are willing to put up with it a lot of others are not. Personally I dropped out and started a business after the sheer wall of feminine condescension became more than I cared to submit myself to.
For straight while males, starting our own companies is one of the last best ways to live a life mostly-free of feminized nonsense. Until they start to get too successful, at which point the (wo)Man steps in and tells us the party's over and it's time to make everything a dysfunctional daycare again.
Really would have preferred not to be a serial entrepreneur but here we are.
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