[Fairview]

Here's the money shot from this article:

How small of an opinion society must have of women, if legislation must be in place to facilitate our professional growth and advancement.

True. And the same goes for racial quotas or racial preferment.

There was a time when certain sectors had to be encouraged to admit women and minorities to their ranks. That time is over; most organizations have learned that the women and minorities are nothing to fear, and we should now move forward without concern for anyone's injured "feelings" or "self-esteem." If you work well, you'll do well, whether in business, the trades, government, academia, the ministry, the military, the professions, or any other field you care to go into. Yes, there are some pockets of resistance, but their prejudices can't be legislated away and it's better to compete with them and defeat them than force them.

Equality for all does not mean that some groups, like my own, get preferment over white people or male people.

[Gordongekko909]

There are still a few incentives to not hire women as readily as men, and pretty much all of them have to do with the fact that women can get pregnant. Hire a woman and you may only have her until her early thirties, at which point her biological clock will go off and she'll retire to raise her kids. If she ends up pregnant before then, you may end up short one worker for a while and still have to pay her.

Then there's the possibility of "hostile workplace environment" suits. It doesn't really matter if you actually have such a workplace environment; all that needs to happen to hit you for a few hundred thousand dollars is for your employee's lawyer to convince a jury that you do.

Basically, hiring women carries higher costs than hiring men. So if employers are reluctant to hire women, it should come as absolutely no surprise.