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She thinks they're highly-correlated in practice, in traditionally-male fields.
No, because part of 'merit' here is 'not acting in typically-feminine ways which ruin the workplace.'
No, not the same thing, but in that case you wouldn't actually need to vet them very carefully. It would simply become the de facto understanding that the workplaces will operate along masculine lines, as they used to when women started entering the workforce. Women would understand this and either self-select out or at least understand that they are to comply with such standards of behavior or face disciplinary action.
No. Implicit in her take is that male workplace culture is itself more meritorious and will naturally outcompete female workplace culture.
So that's her take as I understand it.
Personally I'm not convinced. I don't think it's so easy to just 'treat women like men'. We're biologically hardwired to treat women differently and it's upsetting to almost everyone when women are held to male standards.
As a business owner myself, I prefer to assign female employees to accounts that I expect will go poorly. This is because if I send a man and things go poorly we're fired. If I send a woman and things go poorly "We love her, she's great" and "She works so hard" and "Yeah she's making steady progress, we'll get you more funding." Great stuff as a business owner. You can be sure that even if the regulations were dropped I'd keep hiring women!
It does cause me to reflect upon my own hiring standards. From my perspective the only way for a business, such as the one I describe taking advantage of above, to protect itself would be to demand that I send a man instead of a woman in the first place. Admitting a woman to the position at all is implicitly admitting several potential time-bombs. Presumably this works back around to implying that the value of female labor is inherently somewhat lower even with most else being equal. Interesting.
Anyway the author makes a great moderate case and I'd be happy to see us moving toward her policy proposals.
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