One thing i was thinking about earlier is how gender quotas might increase the 'wage gap' in certain fields where women aren't applying to jobs (and/or college programs) in those fields as much.

Lets take stem fields: say Microsoft decides its been getting too much flack for their gender numbers and puts out a policy telling all HR managers that they have to hire equal numbers of men and women for tech related positions.

So now we have the hr recruiter going to a college job fair. say, 5 women graduating in comp sci apply, and 20 men do. (i don't know what the numbers of tech program enrollments are, so this is just a example situation)

That hr manager can now only hire as many men as women, so only 5 of each can get hired. This means that only the top 25% of men applicants get hired (they would all be equally rated in terms of degrees, but there are other things to consider such as certifications, intern work, gpa, etc ).

One year down the line: the effect of only hiring the top 25 percent of males, but all qualified females has lead to more males getting promoted. (although to be fair, if this happens, some of it would also be from a unfair bias view on women as having only gotten in due to gender quotas.)