Quotas or no quotas?

I'm a bit worried about gender quotas. If say a magazine has them, wouldn't it be possible that they would just be scrambling around to fill them instead of thinking of quality?

But if a magazine doesn't think about gender at all, will they end up not publishing any women writers just because they're much too used to their men? (Or for some other, more nefarious reason...) And will all the women writers then just end up writing in so-called women's magazines since they can't get in to any others?

This is what happened in the New Yorker. Anne Hayes noticed that in several issues (two were mentioned specifically) there were only a couple of pages written by women despite the fact that there are many writing women for them to have. In fact the magazine itself has many women editors. So Anne decided to return the latest offending issue, displeased with it, like a box of cereal that's flawed.

I think there should not be gender quotas - in a perfect world. In OUR world however, if women don't make a noise they are still overlooked. Still. And Anne's quota is so modest too, just five out of thirteen. Don't think five women writers should be hard to find at all, and quality need not suffer.

Here's Anne's letter on facebook.