Application rates of women for our studio borders 8%, and our previous hiring rate of women was 8%; with aggressive affirmative action policies (mostly around marketing and bringing in female code academies such as pinkprogramming[0]) we have increased this to 12%.

You don't specify /why/ the job is less attractive, I stipulated primarily two reasons:

1) Location.

2) Salary.

You might agree that moving 700+ people is a little untenable.

My argument about salary is, and very much playing devils advocate for HQ: "We don't really care who does the job as long as the job gets done, if we can pay a man less, we should hire a man".

[0]: https://www.pinkprogramming.se/en/