One of the biggest problem with affirmative action is that it is always used in a discriminating way. If one were to sort the worst gender or race segregated profession guess how proportional affirmative action is being applied? A while back I took a list of the top 20 gender segregated profession here in Sweden and most of them were government employed, and there is no policy in regard to hiring procedures to address that. No one is even suggesting affirmative action to address the worst professions with 99%/1% and higher gender segregation.
To give some context for Sweden, 90% of the employed people work in a profession that is considered gender segregated. That is to say if you take a random employed woman or man there is a 90% chance that they work somewhere where the ratio is worse than 60/40. If affirmative action was only used to address gender segregation then 9 out of 10 new hiring should be using it.
I think the problem with affirmative action in the gender space is that there is some evidence to suggest that a purely unbiased world would not be one where every industry had a perfect 50/50 split.
So when you approach the problem from the 'outcome' end, it's hard to know what outcome you should be aiming for.
in a competitive market, the company that performs well would be the one that's diverse, if the theory is to be believed. I have not yet seen much evidence for or against though.
Frankly, while it has its flaws, affirmative action is the best we have. A truly blind hiring process is very uncommon (I have never heard of it before this article), and everyone knows that the best way to get a job is through a friend, reinforcing the culture which already exists at a company.