If affirmative action is the best tool, why not make it into a general rule or law. At minimum why doesn't the government who love to talk about diversity implement it as a generally policy for their own hiring? A simple "if a government job title has less than X% compared to existing proportion of the population, then any new hiring must apply affirmative action to correct it".

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.