A company advertises for an engineer to fill a managment position.
Among the employees the new manager is to supervise is a woman
engineer, Ms. X who was told by her former boss that she would soon be
assigned tasks with increased responsibility. The prime candidate for
the manager's position is Mr. Y, a recent immigrant from a country
known for confining the roles for women. Ms. X was alerted by other
women engineers to expect unchallenging, trivial assignments from a
supervisor with Mr. Y's background. Is there anything she can and
should do? Would it be ethical for her to try to forestall the
appointment of Mr. Y?

The answer should be no more than 100 words.

I'm pretty sure not hiring this guy, simply based on his
ethnic/cultural background would be grounds for a dicrimination law
suit.  You can't assume that someone is going to discriminate simply
based on that, if there is some concrete evidence that he has ever
acted as you describe then you have a case for not hiring him.  This
sort of situation is basically the reason why laws against
discrimination in hiring practices exist.  Once he has the job and
acts in any way as you have described above, by all means file a
complaint or a law suit if it is pushed to that, but what you are
describing and wanting to do could get you in a lot trouble not only
at your job, but also legally.

Kind of a preemptive strike - Do unto others before they can do unto you.