Apply HN – HireFemale

I think you're misinterpreting how the law works or what I interpreted OP's intent to be.

1) The laws about discrimination apply to actual hiring decisions, but not to candidate pools. Basically if you have two candidates, one less-qualified female and one more-qualified male, and you choose the female candidate because she is female, then that's unlawful discrimination. However, if you just want to see more females in your interviews because it's currently a sausage party, then that's not discrimination at all, provided you treat both genders equally during the interview & selection process.

2) Right now, there are many companies (especially in tech) who say they can't find enough good female candidates to put in their hiring pipelines. They still go through the normal vetting process for everyone, but it's hard to do a search like "show me resumes for all females with Rails and React experience". I think OP's intent is to create a gender-specific candidate pool, something like a female-only version of Dice. Then it would still be up to the companies to run the candidates through their normal hiring process and evaluate them against other (ostensibly male) candidates.

This seems like pretty simple thing to build and implement, and I'm pretty sure a decent number of HR departments would like to see it. The problem is there's really nothing stopping Dice or Indeed or Monster from just adding a "male/female" self-identification checkbox to do the same thing, so I hope there's more to it than that.