Date: 2017 September (C) OntoOO/ Dennis de Champeaux
(1) It has been reported that already Darwin observed that the genders have different distributions of numerous aspects. (I believe for at least mammals.) The sigma's of the bellcurves are different: male variability is larger than for females. Helena Cronin characterized the males as "More dumbbells but more Nobels". Hence, there are less females on dead-row (and thus) less of them in top positions. {C. Murray's "Human Accomplishment" is exhibit A for this phenomenon.}
Whether or not the difference in the tail of the distributions explains the employment differences for the genders in numerous organizations cannot be decided by (passioned) (political) opinions.
(2) Public education enriches children but works also as a sorting machine: it recognizes talents and 'pushes it up'. This is going on now for over a century and since at least half a century in combination with more assortative mating: talent teams up with talent. Heritability of cognitive skills (statistically) has caused over time the stratification of the society along the cognitive skill dimension. Skewing the income distribution is the unintended, unfortunate side-effect. Do politicians demanding more 'investment' in education know what has been going on and will they get what they ask for?
(3) Improving healthcare in the 20th century has been the engine for the exponential population explosion. Dysgenic fertility (the poor have children and the affluent have money and less children) in combination with a correlation between affluence and cognitive skills has the unfortunate effect that the (genotypic) IQ-bellcurve has shifted to the left in the previous century. There are only a few papers that report attempts to measure the magnitude of the shift, ranging from 1 to 10 points. Bad news anyway, which is the likely reason that this topic is also off limits, with long range consequences.
(4) Humanity migrated out of Africa and due to longtime low mobility developed into separate races with different physiological features and cognitive abilities. Migrations in the previous centuries has caused mixtures that is causing, lets say, frictions. The process described in (2) has amplified these frictions by making the stratification visible. The stratification rooted in genetics prevents any short term solution that I am aware of. To demand/ legislate that proportions of different segments in the society are reflected in the proportions of higher positions is not necessarily in the best interests of a nation. The make-ability of the (world) society is substantially constrained by our collective gene-pool.