Edit: another comment on hn says that Bloomberg's methodology was flawed, which seems more plausible to me.
Why is that? Virtue signaling? Discrimination on males?
Think about it like this, if you'd use the same argument you gave me if the roles were reversed with men being 3-4x overrepresented in a well paying white collar career, everyone would cry sexism and discrimination and action being taken to "fix" that. So why isn't it when the genders are reversed?
Men occupy a position of institutional and societal power that makes such a comparison unhelpful, at best.
That doesn't justify discrimination. You're using the same argument Nazis used to genocide Jews: "they're overrepresented in positions of wealth and power so it's ok to discriminate and kill them all because it's obviously their fault for your problems".
You average man has no benefits in common with the top 1% of wealthy and powerful men who write the rules. The top 1% of Americans have more in common with the top 1% of Russians or Chinese then they do with your average Walmart American male.
Why punish men todays for the original sin? This only leads to extremism as backlash.
If there wasn't a demand for specifically female engineers they would cost the same as male engineers regardless of the supply because an engineer should be fungible with gender. Unless you think that women have some innate characteristic that makes them better than men?
To fix this sort of problem a wholistic approach is required. Whatever the approach it should apply to all equally so that the market is fair. Offhand, my historic recollection is that STEM generally is traditionally less appealing to those of the female sex (by Science/Biology definition of the phrase), and that there might (rightly?) be a perception of poor work / life balance and career tracks that don't pair well with fulfilling time limited biological imperatives. My personal opinion is that enforced labor regulation that provides sufficient parental leave, work / life balance generally, and generally promotes healthier recognition of employees as humans would be better for society overall.
I also recognize that we're probably not going to get that until the US gets rid of the 'first past the post' madness and adopts a voting system with literally _any_ form of IRV. There just won't be bandwidth for such an issue otherwise. Of said systems, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schulze_method is my favorite, but I'd start with ANY IRV, they're (offhand) all less flawed than what we've got.
I’m so old fashioned thinking your immutable characteristics shouldn’t be considered for employment.