Why would you want parity? And your have to force women into fields they don't want in order to get it, just so you can balance your little scale. Whether or not someone is female isn't a particularly interesting aspect of their personality of software development skill. If your company has way below or above the industry average then there's pribably some unfair bias going on, but having women (or any other categorisation du jour) just to tick a box is absurd.
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.
Be careful, if you suggest all women don't naturally aspire to be Silicon Valley software engineers, you might be mistaken for James Damore. ;)
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.
> It should be important to specifically source and hire women.
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?