You're wrong. It is fair. "Normal" recruiting promotion budgets are obviously paying more attention to males. For example, if you market primarily to CS departments which are 90% male, then that is money largely spent on recruiting males. Spending money specifically on recruiting females brings the budget to parity.
Dividing up the population into two groups using your favorite method and then demanding that the amount spent on each of the groups is equal is ridiculous. Not only that, but mathematically you almost surely can't even satisfy two people that have that philosophy simultaneously.
What you want here is that the amount spent on a person is conditionally independent [1] of characteristics that are irrelevant to that persons performance given the characteristics that are relevant to that persons performance.
Why? Just on topic that leaves out two very, very important things:
1. The process is already inherently unfairly biased towards men and it will take a nontrivial investment of resources to counter that.
2. Although it wouldn't affect an individual's performance, diversity (and other things that don't affect individual performance) can affect team performance and thus need to be considered.
This is untrue. There are probably all sorts of societal issues that affect whether one enters the tech industry based on gender, but those aren't inherent to the process. It's also not clear that hiring practices will help the problem. A desirable company can improve its gender ratio, but only by hurting the ratio at other companies. (I don't think this is a bad thing.) Something has to cause more women to become programmers, and I doubt hiring practices are the solution.
That doesn't make any sense. Recruitment happens before candidates even exist. Candidates are the result of recruitment.
Granted, there are a lot of trivialities in this example, but it's pretty representative of how such programs are supposed to work.
Now, rewind. The situation is the same, but nearby is a recruiter. The man walks by again, not noticing the job board. The recuiter does not flag him down. Now the woman walks by and the recruiter walks up to her and interests her in company X. She takes her ideal job and is happy. The man takes a job at company Y, for less pay, and is unhappy.
When programs like the one briefly mentioned in the article are done well their net effect is really signalling more than anything. As trivial as it sounds, such signalling can actually have a large impact.
I would hope that the recruiter isn't, in fact, signalling something along the lines of, "your odds of getting hired at this company are greater than your equally talented male friend." If I were receiving that much extra recruiting attention because of my gender, that is the impression I would get.
However, your second paragraph sort of has things backwards. The current scheme of things strongly signals to women (pretty accurately) "your odds of getting hired are lesser than your equally talented male friend." Such signalling as I described before isn't about saying that their odds are better than their male friend but rather that the company is actively trying to not disadvantage women.
Do you have some sort of evidence for this? Anecdotally, talented female programmers stay on the market far shorter than males do. Most companies desire a gender balance, which makes the limited stock of female programmers more vlauable.