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Great post, but one short question: what kind of affirmative action would they want, if not what Harvard is doing? The only alternatives I can think of are explicit race quotas (which are unconstitutional) and class-based affirmative action (which would create disparate impact).
So there are two actual justifications for affirmative action that people usually give. First, that complicated, subjective admissions systems are invariable going to be implicitly biased against certain groups so there needs to be some brute-force explicit bias to counteract this if the department is actually interested in selecting the most qualified candidates. The most popular affirmative action policies are therefore in line with something like, for example in graduate admissions: check outcomes at graduation/at prelims/at quals for these at-risk groups---women, the standard underrepresented racial minorities, etc. If these outcomes are better than average, modify the admissions policy to give those groups a leg up. Keep on calibrating the blunt modification until outcomes look about the same as an average student.
The second reason is that it's alienating to be one of very few people in a particular group in the department. Therefore, give enough of a leg up that there are at least, for example, 2 women in each graduate class. I guess this is effectively a quota by proxy, but it's never an explicit numerical target that needs to be reached, just if there were too few one year, increase the weight the next year. It's also such a low requirement that it shouldn't really ever come up unless the first point was horribly messed up.
Harvard's affirmative action on the other hand is seen as almost a complement to legacy admissions but with good publicity, at the most conspiratorial, way keep down an "uppity" new meritocratic class from competing with a hereditary elite. The whole "helping underrepresented minorities" thing, while they think is a good goal, in this case is just a Trojan horse for a true, nefarious goal.
Personal anecdote: I was in Australia's Chemistry Olympiad program twice. The setup of the program was that they put out an exam to anyone interested, best 21 people in the country went to a "scholar school" which was three weeks of extremely intensive university-level learning (we were all high school students), then based off a set of exams there and afterward they'd pick a team of four to represent Australia.
Now, I didn't get picked for the team either time (this was 07 and 08). But take a wild guess at the sex ratio, despite the total lack of any discrimination on the part of the program - it was simply "who had the highest marks on the exam".
Answer: I think there might have been one girl out of 21 one time? I know at least one time it was literally all boys. This wasn't unusual. Physics was similar; biology was typically something like 17:4 favouring girls (I was one of the boys in that one in 05 and 06).
The assumption that if you give everyone equal opportunity, the amount of men and women both able and willing to do X will be the same? It's not actually true. Usually it's not that dramatic, but under extreme selection (IIRC it was about 32,000 kids a year doing that exam? And that's, of course, just the ones who were interested and whose parents/teachers/etc. thought they had a chance) little tips to the balance become nearly pass/fail. And AIUI Harvard has roughly the same degree of selection as was going on there.
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