In that case, I would say HR is at fault not for asking that affirmative action be taken, but for not backing it up by making the job attractive in the first place.
If you can actually attract people to your company, then asking that you hire at least half women shouldn't be an issue; there are plenty of qualified women for any position. If you can't attract people to the job generally, I think any other factors would largely be noise versus the real problem.
> then asking that you hire at least half women shouldn't be an issue;
Application rates of women for our studio borders 8%, and our previous hiring rate of women was 8%; with aggressive affirmative action policies (mostly around marketing and bringing in female code academies such as pinkprogramming[0]) we have increased this to 12%.
You don't specify /why/ the job is less attractive, I stipulated primarily two reasons:
1) Location.
2) Salary.
You might agree that moving 700+ people is a little untenable.
My argument about salary is, and very much playing devils advocate for HQ: "We don't really care who does the job as long as the job gets done, if we can pay a man less, we should hire a man".
If you can actually attract people to your company, then asking that you hire at least half women shouldn't be an issue; there are plenty of qualified women for any position. If you can't attract people to the job generally, I think any other factors would largely be noise versus the real problem.