Our policy is still to hire the right person for the job. Setting a target about gender balance doesn’t change that at all.
We run a fair, robust interview process to determine whether people are right for our roles. Gender doesn’t weigh into that. By publicly setting a target, we’re committing to finding the right person for the role. The right person is just as likely to be a woman or a man (if we assume that talent is equally distributed across the population, which I absolutely do). If our team doesn’t reflect the gender balance of the population, we’re very likely to be missing out on the right person a lot of the time - there’s an equal chance that the best person for the job is male or female and if our team is entirely female or entirely male then probabilistically we’ve missed the best person about half of the time. It’s about balance.
I’m afraid I don’t really understand your last point - we already offer flexible working and family-friendly benefits to all staff regardless of gender.