Do you think that employers and boards actually look at all applicants equally and don't immediately default to the male applicant?

Why would they default to the male applicants? Women are more likable than men, a phenomenon known in psychology as the "women are wonderful" effect.

The “women are wonderful” effect is the phenomenon found in psychological research which suggests that people associate more positive attributes with the general social category of women compared to men. This effect reflects an emotional bias toward women as a general case. The phrase was coined by Eagly & Mladinic (1994) after finding that both men and women participants tend to assign exceptionally positive traits to women (men are also viewed positively, though not quite as positively), with woman participants showing a far more pronounced bias. The authors supposed that the positive general evaluation of women might derive from the association between women and nurturing characteristics.

Both men and women prefer women, and women especially prefer other women. So if anything, we should expect the male employees to have a harder time because of their sex, not the opposite.

In my experience, feminism is about power -- with a goal to sharing power, not replacing one power with another.

Can you make some examples of how feminists have tried to improve the lives of men? I can think of a thousand examples where they've tried to destroy them.