The premise of your argument is that people are hired (or promoted) based on concrete, analytical evaluations of their abilities. Nobody who works in this industry believes that happens.
We enjoy discussing how warped industry hiring processes are when it's just shop talk, but introduce gender parity to the discussion and all the sudden it's like someone proposed to round pi down to 3.
I was speaking more about the use of the term advantage by OP. When these types of discussions arise people often talk about how it's unfair about giving someone an advantage over others.
The problem is it doesn't go any deeper than the surface, about the underlying advantage that some parts of society have that others don't. It simplifies the discussion into an almost child like argument about who gets the sweets and assumes that it's a zero sum game.
I am a strong believer in meritocracy, but I also am aware of the actually reality of society means that it doesn't perfectly exist. I feel that if people feel strongly about meritocracy they should be open to increasing the funnel of people that can participate.
As other have said this problem doesn't seem to be self correcting in the tech industry, and if promoting someone just because they are female is something people try I don't really have a problem with it. I have seen many people in my career in this industry promoted for worse reasons.
Can you tell me what is equal about hiring a woman over a man, "just because"?