From what I have seen, there are also obstacles that stem from universities and funding bodies doing "affirmative action" that has not been thought through comp

From what I have seen, there are also obstacles that stem from universities and funding bodies doing "affirmative action" that has not been thought through completely. Think about it - whenever someone needs participants for a committee of some sort, a leader for a research centre, or similar, they always want to achieve a better gender balance than the actual average gender balance in their field. This means that female scientists are requested to do significantly more non-science work than male scientists. Of course this has drawbacks.