Hire only the best people, because being the best isn't correlated with gender? And actively recruit from balanced pools (paying attention to gender balance), which is very different from making hiring decisions based on gender? This is pretty straightforward if you're in fact committed to hiring only the best people.

Seems like bullshit. As someone who's been doing a lot of interviewing recently the ratio of male to female SDE candidates is at least 10:1. If we assume that ability is uniformly distributed there is literally no way to get to a 50:50 split or anywhere close to it without discrimination.

If you believe that ability is uniformly distributed, and you're getting a 10:1 ratio of men to women, 9/10 of the men who apply are unqualified. Men are known to apply to jobs they're not qualified for way more than women do.

I have also been doing a lot of interviewing recently and that number seems about right.