Overheard on gender quotas: “If I were female, it’d be easier to get a job”

A few weeks ago, I spoke to a male scientist who was feeling slightly existential, slightly drunk, and didn’t know me at all. He was becoming well-established in his field and had spent a lot of his life learning and researching at prestigious places. Early on in the conversation, he told me:

“My best option is a sex change. Then it’d be easier to get a job and I’d be paid more”.

Ha.

In his firm, he had been tasked with the responsibility of hiring the next scientist to join their group. As part of the task, he was encouraged for them to be female and allowed to apply less stringent CV criteria if they were.

While he did admit that it was harder for women once they got the job (and said that science, as he saw it, was very sexist), his argument continued:

How is it fair that women get a chance like that because of their gender? Why did he have to hire someone less qualified because they were female? How could the woman live with herself knowing that they got the job because of their gender?