For one thing, the wage gap as you're usually used to seeing it presented doesn't mean what it's passed off as meaning. The media prints a number of "X% pay gap, women should stop working every year in July because they're paid that much less" and kind of presume that it means paid less for doing the same work.
The gender pay gap number that is always reported is actually just an aggregate mean of salary across the population, NOT a difference between people employed in the same job. For people employed in the same job the difference is a much smaller number. The main reason behind the reported number is that women on average work less hours in their life and take career breaks, and salary tends to go up with time worked. There are more reasons but this is the big chunk, women earn pretty close to men who work the same average number of hours.
So in summary, you might be able to save some percentage per-hour by hiring female developers but the number is much smaller than you'd imagine. You'd then have to offset that against the much higher difficulty of finding equally skilled female developers. There are just objectively less of them, and those that exist are at a premium because companies like Google are facing political pressure to have equal numbers of male and female developers.
I'd say the solution is to stop looking for a solution and worry about a problem that matters.
Not that there's 0 discrimination or that it doesn't matter that there is but we live in a heating planet where the US just elected Trump and people live on $1 a day.
And a significant fraction of all arguments on the internet are about why there are more male developers. And the honest truth is mostly that men are way more interested in being developers. It's like funny if it wasn't tragic.
The gender pay gap number that is always reported is actually just an aggregate mean of salary across the population, NOT a difference between people employed in the same job. For people employed in the same job the difference is a much smaller number. The main reason behind the reported number is that women on average work less hours in their life and take career breaks, and salary tends to go up with time worked. There are more reasons but this is the big chunk, women earn pretty close to men who work the same average number of hours.
So in summary, you might be able to save some percentage per-hour by hiring female developers but the number is much smaller than you'd imagine. You'd then have to offset that against the much higher difficulty of finding equally skilled female developers. There are just objectively less of them, and those that exist are at a premium because companies like Google are facing political pressure to have equal numbers of male and female developers.