My university's "equality & diversity committee" is very focused on problems women face in higher academia. E.g., they have special mailing lists for female students & scientists and before COVID-19 I saw special programs for women in STEM and career advice for women from time to time. Last time I checked most student positions in the "equality & diversity committee" are explicitly described using a female form, except for the head which is described as either male or female.

They also want to equalize the number of men and women at every career level to exactly 50% except for students where women outnumber men by 12% (which is the highest in absolute numbers) and they use many papers to explain why women are being discriminated against.

A lot of these papers are very old (some >20, 30 years old) and it is questionable if they measure actual discrimination. E.g. women are more likely to get a teaching award than a research award which could just be a result of women being more dedicated to teaching which is true from my experience. All-female teams get a lower rate of citations than all-male teams (counter-evidence in Esarey & Bryant 2018) which they say is discrimination while mixed teams get an even higher rate of citations than all-male teams which they attribute to a greater quality of research.

They require recruiters to invite an equal number of women or all female applicants to job interviews in fields where women are underrepresented so long they meet the qualifications, which sounds harmless but strictly leads to a bias: imagine 10 male and 3 female applicants and the professor wants to interview 6 people, the professor would have to interview all female applicants and since they don't want to interview everyone that subtracts from the potentially better qualified male applicants which are not interviewed. And they suggest that recruiters ask for the "gender competence" of those they want to hire.

They also cite Science faculty’s subtle gender biases favor male students, Moss-Racusin et al. 2012, which can be criticized for several reasons and is not the best measure of actual bias (see e.g. women preferred in STEM hiring by 2:1 and Women have substantial advantage in STEM faculty hiring, except when competing against more-accomplished men).

They make a bunch of other suggestions, a lot to enhance the compatibility of family and career, which I don't disagree with.

And I was wondering, are there any problems specifically men face in academia, and any studies to demonstrate this? I live in Germany (however, US studies are also fine because the "equality & diversity committee" also uses those).