It's an awkward, overly simplified attempt to correct systemic errors.

There is reason to believe that women, people of color, etc are unfairly kept out and it does great harm to their lives (and has other undesirable consequences). We mostly don't know how to remedy that, so we come up with some cludgy thing like "Let's set a goal of hiring more women" instead of looking for a more elegant solution.

Unsurprisingly, it tends to not work all that well. Then you get articles like this one trying to explain the failure, in essence.

Edit: The Rooney Rule is the only elegant solution I've really seen for systemic bias in hiring. The NFL requires teams to interview people of color who apply for certain positions because they determined that the bias in their pipeline was pre-interview stage. It did wonders to improve the numbers without setting a quota.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rooney_Rule