Lol, messed up but it makes an interesting point. Why don't people hire mostly women and save a bunch on payroll? Does the wage gap exist because companies pay women less due to being sexist or because of other confounding factors?
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.
Inertia seems like an adequate explanation. Since there is a history of paying women less, you expect to be able to hire a woman with a smaller offer, other companies expect the same, so the best offer she gets is not the same as the best offer a man with the same capability gets.
It could easily be explained by the sentiment, which I do not share or agree with, that “male programmers are better, but we are forced to hire women so let’s pay them less”.
I'd go with the usual Apex fallacy. One guy gets 20% more money than me!
What? The other one who gets 20% less? Nah he's invisible. It's like the usual "men are in power". Yeah, some men. A lot are in shitty dead-end job with no prospect to get a better life. The death-at-work gap, the fact being a Father at Home is still frowned upon: don't care.
If there is an earning gap maybe the fact men have to earn more for their family and can't rely on welfare when they lose their job is an incentive to work more and negotiate harder. Call me a sexist but worst case scenario a woman can always decide to marry a provider.
