I think for that reason alone they're a good thing. Could it be taken too far? Sure but I don't see that happening right now, and at the moment given how few women are in our field I think more such things are needed to at least reduce the sharp edges people view from our world.
But I'm under the impression that today we offer women-only CS courses and the norm has become women get hired over equally or more qualified men in the name of eradicating sexism.
I humbly suggest this is taking it too far. I don't want to automatically get turned down for a job because a woman applied. I don't want to automatically get turned down for CS help because I am the wrong gender.
Every time I hear about a company spending money on CS help for women or "prioritizing hiring women" I cringe, but the HN community seems to readily accept and celebrate those posts.
Certainly! Nobody's goal is to reverse the historical situation so that men are systematically shut out of the field in some sort of vengeance for women being shut out for so long. A level playing field is absolutely the goal.
But despite all the progress we've made, there are still many, many places where women have to deal with negative biases as students, as job applicants, and as employees. Women still routinely face exactly the sort of bias that you're concerned about, except that it's no longer socially acceptable for people to admit (even to themselves) that they're doing it. (Different industry, but there was a study not long ago that conclusively demonstrated subtle but meaningful bias against women when hiring science lab techs: fake applications with female names were rated lower than identical applications with male names, by men and women alike.)
So my understanding is that when a company or college explicitly states a policy prioritizing women for help or hiring, they usually hope that this overt boost to female applicants will just cancel out the invisible but just as real biases against them.
Here is an article that was posted on hacker news saying just that, and notice the very positive reaction it got from the community here.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4730673
EDIT: I know this is anecdotal evidence, and it's from Europe not the US. But notice what a positive reaction this had from HN. To me it shows that we don't mind this reverse historical situation.
Lets say the whole thing is trying to reverse the course direction of CS to help get more women in the field. We know that having equal amounts of both genders helps and strengthens teams. So while the preferential hiring of women might at first glance appear to be discriminatory, and it may very well be that. The intent might be completely different and the goal of the exercise is to improve the company or teams performance.
Speaking from experience, I prefer more balanced teams. I absolutely hate men only teams because what eventually always seems to happen is alpha/beta male monkey behavior. It is unproductive and I notice a distinct lack of it when there are women around.
Basically I think this is a non-issue to worry about until we get close to 50% of women in CS in general. Given how far behind we are, I'm not even concerned right now. In fact I'd love to join things like rails bridge or whatever just to get things moving forward.
Also note "the HN community" doesn't exist, we're all individuals. This is my own viewpoint and biases. "we" celebrate these things because CS is far too white male centric and that needs to change. We need more viewpoints.
If you're a hiring manager and have 4 white males on a team, do you really need another white male? Probably not, is it morally wrong to want a female on the team or say a non white male? I cannot see why it would be. Especially when we now know based on current research that even if the candidate is technically worse than another, the overall team benefits from the different viewpoints more than a "star" developer.
Again, I am not in agreement this is at all a moral decision from a hiring point of view or overall as a community/CS viewpoint. Why is it wrong to hire for better performance? Why is it wrong to want more females in CS? Most importantly, how does that conflate to being a morality tale? The latter question would be aided here in you explaining your philosophical underpinnings of why a single gender meetup to get more of that underrepresented gender in the community as being morally wrong.
The slave analogy is off base for this particular situation.
Suppose a case where a men-only field led to better performance, would you not think that it is morally correct to exclude women in this case? And that's besides the point: I don't think we should encourage women to go into CS because it makes CS better, I think we should encourage women to go into CS to let them know if that's what they want to do they can and they'll be welcome and they'll have a better life like that.
If I was a hiring manager I would want to have more women on my team, but I would not feel very good about myself turning down a man more qualified for a woman for no reason other than his gender. What if I'm Apple and I just destroyed this man's lifelong dream of working for Apple? Hiring should be based on merit, and nothing else. What's next? Hiring people from different religions because the team will benefit from the different viewpoints? So if you followed a religion you'd be more likely to get hired. I don't agree with that.
As for whether it's the norm or not, here is the article that gave me that impression: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4730673
If that were a real policy (which I don't think it is), I suppose the point is that even then the odds would be against it impacting you as there are so few women applicants.