How do we make everyone have equal opportunities? We can't.
That's incredibly defeatist for someone who seems like quite a progressive thinker.
Patrick's couple of links were a good start. That should be the conversation. Here's an example off the top of my head:
Q) Why aren't many females playing in bands compared to males?
- Find out how many females are picking up instruments at a young age compared to males
- If the numbers are low, find out why, then invest and work towards removing the barriers if there are any. If there are no barriers, then invest in the encouragement of females to pick up instruments.
- If the numbers are fine at a young age, go to the next level, find out when they are dropping out, why, and remove those barriers.
I think this is far far better than doing absolutely nothing, and then enforcing an equality-of-outcome, which is basically an ambulance at the bottom of the cliff, trying to fix it with one easy policy.
These things are not easy. They need time and money.
Well that would be the outcome from that process, and to me would be perfectly fine. We then accept that more boys than girls prefer to be in bands, quotas are not needed, and we work hard to ensure that the girls that do take this up are not discriminated against.
Others might argue that it's a construct of society, and that we've been bought up being told what it is that our gender likes and dislikes. They will say we've got to force the outcome because our society basically means that we don't know what we want. To a superficial degree that's true (pink vs blue etc), but overall, science has thoroughly debunked it. Males and females definitely do prefer different things in general, regardless of the societal and cultural conditions.