>> You're not lowering your standards for women, but you're raising your standards for men, and then employees might notice and form the impression that the average male employee is better than the average female employee, which would be unfortunate.

No process is ever random. All processes have side effects, that make some kind of memory/feed back loop.

If there are two groups of uniform set of people A and B. And you if make it harder for A to succeed. Set of people in A will have to work way harder, than set B over very long periods of time to win consistently. You will end up making A far more stronger than B. While your intention was to make B at least as good as A over time, you have now achieved the very exact opposite of what you set out of achieve.

This is common in sports, and even competitive exams. Candidates are trained to take on difficult problems than the baseline so that they can get better than the baseline.

At this point the bar for winning is largely to subject to interpretation. Did you raise the bar for A, or did you decrease the bar for B? It depends on what you consider the baseline.