As for your university efforts I'd have to know what those actually were before making a call.
And re progresivism and quotas; it isn't based on it but it subscribes heavily to it due to its utility.
As far as progressivism and quotas, I simply can't argue on this unless you give me a specific progressive tendencies. If you're talking about US progressives writ large then the main reason quotas are so popular is because the people in power that put those quotas in place, which often weren't even progressives, found quotas to be easy to implement as other solutions are very difficult and inconvenient for those in power, though popular.
What you assert as proof that "it worked" was, if I understood your "30%!" correctly, an increase in equality of outcome.
How does this square with your claim to favour equality of opportunity, not outcome? Doesn't it show that what worked was what you claim not to favour; why would you crow about that?
As for the 2nd point, that's more of what I'm getting at; that core populist/mainstream progressive movement. I could certainly believe that the leaders are jumping on it purely due to, as you say the simplicity and popularity of them.
Using Scandinavia as a barometer for equity in engineering for men and women is cherry-picking. Where I live, these measures were very successful and in the leading engineering-only university the rate of women graduating is now 30%. Seems successful to me.
As for this: >Perhaps you don't, but for progressives it remains a core part of their ideology and one that can't be no-true-scotsman-ed away, now that the belief has become publicly embarrassing to have supported.
The only way to get out of this conundrum is for you to find evidence that at the ideological level progressivism is based on equality of outcome. I can't prove the negative. I can give examples however of specific far-left ideologies from anarchism to communism to mutualism to intersectional liberalism do not, at the ideological level, aim for equality of outcome.