Academic Men Explain Things to Me

As readers of this site surely know, women are drastically underrepresented in most STEM fields, particularly at the faculty level. One colleague of mine argued that as a result of this disparity, it is much easier for women to get academic jobs than it is for men because hiring departments are under a lot of pressure to even out their gender ratios. Never mind the demonstrated falsity of this argument (or the common-sense impossibility of its being true), where is this “pressure” coming from, exactly? From the same patriarchal institutions that created the imbalance in the first place?