You can't just sit around and wait for candidates to apply, you have to actively source them.
My current company (not speaking as an official representative of them of course) is actively working to hire women, non-binary people and poc, especially to the devteam. We aren't there yet at 50% non-men; but we're actively trying.
We're sponsoring conferences, having people speak and doing a lot of active outreach. We also have great benefits and work is pretty flexible and understanding of family needs.
Creating a significantly higher demand for women developers is one way to help mitigate those causes and create more opportunity.
Is that actually true, though? And if you think it is, how do you know? Here's what I know: The percentage of women that take the AP computer science exam in high school is about the same as the percentage of female software engineers. This means that whatever is keeping women out is happening before this point in the funnel.
If the pool is 15% women (made up number, the actual number may differ), then it seems a reasonable expectation to have about 15% women devs on a team. But if the team is very small, we have to realize that the world is not perfectly homogenous, and some teams will have more than 15% and some less.
I'm all for making sure that groups aren't discriminated against in hiring, and if the overall hiring stats don't match the applicant pool, then that's a problem. But this constant pretending that women and men are not different is stupid. Men and women are deeply different biologically and that will reflect in social and cultural ways, which reflect in interests, and we can't force it to happen otherwise.
We should remove all barriers to fairness, encourage underprivileged groups, and educate, but we shouldn't try to force an equivalence that doesn't exist.
We need more girls in the field by cultivating different career ambitions.
That doesn't mean we shouldn't improve the other end of this as well, getting more women / girls into coding. Both are important.
You don't have to do anything (nor do you have to feel bad for using a normal hiring pipeline). You can choose to try to "fix" the gender-balance in tech thing [if you believe it's a problem], or not. There are millions of problems in the world, and it's up to you to pick and choose which ones you want to go out of your way to be proactive on.
How else do you expect to get gender parity? It should be important to specifically source and hire women.
If women aren't interested in the job, you've already got gender parity. Women are moral agents and can make decisions too, you know. This is also why no one is complaining about the lack of gender parity in sanitation services.
I personally don't see why software engineering seems to be constantly placed as the hallmark of jobs to work at, to the extent that if people don't want to do it, it's a problem. A lot of software engineering jobs are grueling, long-hour (or all-hour) jobs with questionable benefit to society. 'Hey, we made the ad company's ad tracking code 10% more pervasive! Wooo!' So you get a poor work-life balance in exchange for some slight premium on the pay you could make in a half a dozen related fields.
Meanwhile, the UI designer or business manager probably gets to go home at 5 PM, and nurses and teachers get to directly see and interact with people whose lives they are making noticeably better. Maybe the fact that more women don't want to be software engineers, is because women are running at a higher level than those of us who sign ourselves up for this stuff.
Which is to say, I don't see a problem with someone who wants to do a job doing it, but I don't see any reason we need to push people to do it.
I read this that you believe that an applicant's genitals or gender identity ought to be a positive qualification for employment. Am I reading you correctly/charitably?