I'm glad you were able to make the call to get out of an unhealthy situation. Academia too often is, for the reasons you've said (and evidenced by the links you've provided), an absurdly difficult place to exist in. And nobody seems to know how to solve it, which is weird for an institution filled with the brightest people on the planet. However, part of the reason may also be administrative takeover, which leaves ever decreasing amounts of power in the hands of the academics. See, e.g. https://politicalscience.jhu.edu/faculty-books/fall-of-the-faculty-the-rise-of-the-all-administrative-university-and-why-it-matters/.

Anyway, I really do hope we can find a way to fix the issues. Not only does it hurt the people involved, it also hurts the advancement of human knowledge. There is no silver lining. It's just plain bad. (There are far worse types of bad, of course, but that doesn't mean that the people intimately involved with this type of bad shouldn't take responsibility for fixing it.)

However, I really don't think the line I've quoted above reflects your ability to understand complex phenomena, and I think it's counterproductive for making needed changes quickly rather than after slow and contentious battles. If you want the broadest support from people in the sciences, failing to distinguish between rates and proportions is a poor way to start. The implication, whether true or not, is that the speaker cares more about ideology than reality.

Of course, as you well know, there's a long path from "hey, I want to do science!" or some other academic subject to "hey, I'm a professor (in the British system, where that takes even longer and is less assured)!" If you're not going to appoint professors at random in the name of equity (and if you are, you need a very strong argument justifying that, not just an aside about not caring about equity), as opposed to fixing the pipeline so that the proportions gradually relax to the equitable state because the process is now equitable, you can't say "proportion inequitable => nobody cares about equity". Because the rates might show otherwise.

The paper you cited does look at rates, as it should, and concludes that there are (probably) pipeline problems too. Unfortunately, their model assumes only a one-year latency! If you're in steady-state (or near), it doesn't matter, but if you predict that 25% of Ph.D candidates advance to being a postdoc each year, and then hire double the number of Ph.D. students in 2012, that you don't get a bunch of extra postdocs in 2013 is no surprise. Even with all that, it still seems quite likely that something is amiss with the senior-lecturer-to-associate-professor transition. The ratio held pretty steady at about 1500 men to 1300 women, so the almost twofold discrepancy between expected and actual change in numbers does indeed seem indicative of a problem of unfair treatment. But of course one should test various hypotheses.

But if you don't get into things at least this deep, just noting the proportions isn't helpful, because it doesn't distinguish between on ongoing problem (= needs attention) and a fixed problem that simply takes time to play out because the dynamics are on the timescale of generations.

Elsewhere you did tackle the rates issue--that's good! But I don't think mixing in some unhelpful reasoning with better-targeted reasoning is a plus.