Don't even look away. Just accept that people do differ by birth characteristics and that there are often legitimate reasons to discriminate based on those factors. There's no shame in that.
Look at firefighters. To get a female firefighter in New York they had to lower the strength tests. Those tests were calibrated to be able to carry people out of a burning building. Do you really want a 'process' that one tiny step at a time leads to people eventually burning to death because their rescuer was a tiny 5ft girl who couldn't lift them?
I Disagree with you on the word "often". There are far many jobs where physical body doesn't matter (and even there, you wont accept fat young guy either, so you might as well just list what do you expect candidate to be able to preform), than those that do.
Now lets look at a story in question:
> In the latest rulings, the EEOC cited four companies for age discrimination:
> Capital One, Edwards Jones, Enterprise Holdings and DriveTime Automotive Group.
> Three companies were cited for discrimination by both age and gender: Nebraska Furniture Mart,
> Renewal by Andersen LLC and Sandhills Publishing Company.
No firefighters, no lingerie models ( I thought there were male underwear models).
As far as who do I expect to become firefighter ? Anyone who can do the job. If it means only males can do the job (I have no idea hoe true that is), I am fine with that exception. But if there is a woman who can lift just as much as average firefighter, and want to do the job, why would you prevent her from doing it ?
You may expect that about firefighters, but people with the same definition of progress as you see that as a problem to be solved by lowering the bar.
I think you're also drawing a rather arbitrary line here, based on assuming the differences between young/old/male/female are purely physical. But that's clearly not the case. If you're looking for a salesperson for your motorbike store, you'll probably have more luck fishing amongst men than women and that's not discrimination unless your job ad literally says "no women allowed".
That said, I do agree programming is not a job where there's any obvious way or reason to do such targeting. But presumably these companies had reasons for making those choices. Why don't we hear their side of the story?
It's a process, you move goal posts one tiny step at a time and eventually it will become less and less acceptable.