If you're a hiring manager and have 4 white males on a team, do you really need another white male? Probably not, is it morally wrong to want a female on the team or say a non white male? I cannot see why it would be. Especially when we now know based on current research that even if the candidate is technically worse than another, the overall team benefits from the different viewpoints more than a "star" developer.
Again, I am not in agreement this is at all a moral decision from a hiring point of view or overall as a community/CS viewpoint. Why is it wrong to hire for better performance? Why is it wrong to want more females in CS? Most importantly, how does that conflate to being a morality tale? The latter question would be aided here in you explaining your philosophical underpinnings of why a single gender meetup to get more of that underrepresented gender in the community as being morally wrong.
The slave analogy is off base for this particular situation.
Suppose a case where a men-only field led to better performance, would you not think that it is morally correct to exclude women in this case? And that's besides the point: I don't think we should encourage women to go into CS because it makes CS better, I think we should encourage women to go into CS to let them know if that's what they want to do they can and they'll be welcome and they'll have a better life like that.
If I was a hiring manager I would want to have more women on my team, but I would not feel very good about myself turning down a man more qualified for a woman for no reason other than his gender. What if I'm Apple and I just destroyed this man's lifelong dream of working for Apple? Hiring should be based on merit, and nothing else. What's next? Hiring people from different religions because the team will benefit from the different viewpoints? So if you followed a religion you'd be more likely to get hired. I don't agree with that.
Lets say the whole thing is trying to reverse the course direction of CS to help get more women in the field. We know that having equal amounts of both genders helps and strengthens teams. So while the preferential hiring of women might at first glance appear to be discriminatory, and it may very well be that. The intent might be completely different and the goal of the exercise is to improve the company or teams performance.
Speaking from experience, I prefer more balanced teams. I absolutely hate men only teams because what eventually always seems to happen is alpha/beta male monkey behavior. It is unproductive and I notice a distinct lack of it when there are women around.
Basically I think this is a non-issue to worry about until we get close to 50% of women in CS in general. Given how far behind we are, I'm not even concerned right now. In fact I'd love to join things like rails bridge or whatever just to get things moving forward.
Also note "the HN community" doesn't exist, we're all individuals. This is my own viewpoint and biases. "we" celebrate these things because CS is far too white male centric and that needs to change. We need more viewpoints.