Gender-based affirmative action in science & engineering education

It would appear that science and engineering schools have been trying fairly hard to boost the percentage of women in their programs.

The politically correct take on the gender imbalance in science & technology programs seems to be that it's just a failure of marketing:

“The way engineering traditionally has been marketed doesn’t appeal as much to women as to men,” said Carrie-Ann Miller, director of the Women in Science and Engineering program at Stony Brook University

This whole issue seems like small potatoes at first glance. But could gender-based affirmative action in science & technology education (and employment) have unintended consequences? An Instapundit commenter writes:

I work for a very large high tech company. I presently manage a research team in the corporate lab. The problem is that there is no encouragement for American non-minority males to go into science and engineering because we will almost never hire them. Instead we are being forced to look for technical females and under-represented minorities. Since very few American females choose engineering, we end up hiring Chinese and Indian women. The universities that I work with tell me that they find it almost impossible to recruit American males to PhD programs. I believe within less than a generation we will be in deep trouble, technically, in this country, and we’ll be without the means and capability to maintain the highly sophisticated civilization that we’ve constructed.