I can't find the paper but somebody in the field keeps citing to me how in academic settings intern hiring skews towards women when given the same qualifications. Unfortunately this is because it's creepy old dudes choosing between having a lady work under him or a man, choose a lady for a number of reasons... perceived controllability, sexy reasons, etc. There's all kinds of discrimination, sometimes when it looks positive, it may not be.
I have only heard one respect in which women are ahead of men in STEM fields. It was part of an APS lecture on racial and gender representation in STEM, which in part addressed the notion of the leaky pipeline. This is the idea that, however many women start off in a STEM field, they tend to drop out over time, so for instance the percentage of women faculty in a physics dept will be much lower than the percentage of undergraduate students enrolled. Of course what this ignores (and what the speaker explained) is that the percentage of faculty mirrors the percentage of women students years ago, when they themselves were students. Here is that single place where women come out ahead: the percentage of women students in a STEM field who go on to careers in academia is slightly higher than the percentage of men students. This still doesn't imply that a woman is more likely to be hired for a given position, as there will still be many more male candidates, especially in fields like physics and engineering.
Depends where the implicit bias is. If a scientist reads a scientific publication and forms their opinion based on author's sex, not on the presented facts, that calls for serious measures.
But in any other case, lowering the standards shouldn't be allowed because it's like suggesting that women are not equal to men in science, which isn't true. Also, the field would suffer from such practices. Surely, there are other ways depending on the situation. I think support of any kind for women and girls choosing STEM is a good measure.
There are many recent publications on how to address implicit bias, both on an individual level and in organizations. Here are a couple:
From Psychology Today
From AAUW
From the Diversity Council
They seem to focus on two different strategies: (1) maximizing anonymity in evaluation processes, e.g. removing names from resumes, or having musicians audition behind a screen; and (2) increasing personal understanding of people in different groups through meaningful interaction with members of those groups. At least a couple of the articles point out the importance of individuals acknowledging that they do in fact have biases.
As far as the number of citations goes, I find that an odd measure to go by if that was what they did. After all, some of those citations could be people citing that physicists' work as something their argument contradicts or proves to be false. Plus, just because something is commonly utilized does not mean it's necessarily top notch. Now, I would hope with the standards of the discipline this is not the case; however, it is a theoretical possibility.
Number of publications, regardless of how often cited, is the usual measure. Some schools will go beyond this to weight publications by the impact of the journal or the citation record, but not all do. The department I applied to looked at just raw numbers.
This suggests two questions regarding women's publications: are they less often cited than publications by men; and are they less often accepted for publication to begin with. As someone who serves as a peer reviewer, I can say I have run into more bias in methodology, topic researched, and even language (if the paper is poorly written and hard to read) than anything about the authors, including gender.