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As an employer you can easily test anything you want during the interview, tailored to the job's needs and expectation: technical knowledge, working under pressure, soft skills, etc. Then why would you care about school marks when the candidate proves able on the interview?

It's because academic performance is by design an average of skills displayed over multiple years. You can't fulfill the expectations of all employers at once with a standardized test. The degree (and the marks attached to it) just show the average performance per topic over the years. How fast you can finish your assignment is an integral part of any academic program. That's why you get tight(ish) deadlines for any assignment, and exam times.

By extending that time you can no longer make the difference between 2 people with good knowledge but different working under pressure skills. That's the difference between good and best.

I'm not saying the exams become irrelevant, just that this kind of thing does more to discredit the image of women in STEM than a slightly lower exam mark. This just strengthens preconceptions that some groups need help to be equal. And it's backed up by universities and whatever science they used to reach this conclusion.

[eeeuo]

Knowledge tests that introduce time pressure become lossy. An employer can test performance under pressure and extrapolate that against historical data, but they cannot do it in the reverse order as the information is lost.

> By extending that time you can no longer make the difference between 2 people with good knowledge but different working under pressure skills. That's the difference between good and best.

This is true, but if two students have the same score from elongated tests and one does not test well under pressure, it's straightforward to understand that one of the students would have performed better on a time pressure exam. However, consider:

Student A achieves 92% on a 1.75 hour exam but would have achieved 90% on a 1.5 hour exam. Student B achieves 94% on a 1.75 hour exam but would have achieved 88% on a 1.5 hour exam.

In a 1.5 hour exam, the clear conclusion is that student A is the better student. But is student A truly the better student in this scenario? The exam length is a rough estimate made by a university, and it seems like an arbitrary line to draw.

Allowing every student to have enough time to show the breadth of their knowledge on the subject material is not "helping" women. The same principle is applied to both men and women. It is an attempt to provide a level playing field and work towards meritocracy.[1]

Consider an exam on a technical subject that contains questions that are difficult to parse in English. Non-native English speakers have trouble parsing the questions which results in lower test scores. If I suggest that we simplify the language in order to accurately gauge the students knowledge of the subject, you may suggest that this is discrimination against native English speakers. This is undoubtedly true in the context, but it is an attempt to move towards a level playing field which tests knowledge of the subject, which is the entire point of the exercise. You can test for English proficiency separately, that is not the point of the exam.

[1] Contrast this with link 2 in the GP which is straightforward discrimination against men and was roundly rejected for that reason.