"Oh, a female applicant!" (Tone: Surprise)

"He's male which immediately places him above [the female applicant]" (Tone: Joking... but inappropriately sandwiched between comments relevant to their ability to do the job, imo)

Argument ensued as I pushed to see how serious he was being... had an interesting 5 minutes of biting my tongue while the owner of the company justified not hiring women, at length. The usual stuff, maternity leave etc. Plenty of anecdotes.

Most interesting part was right after the surprise at a female applicant, though...

"I've only known one female developer that was any good... now, you might say that there just aren't that many female developers full stop, and that's true, but there must be a reason for that"

I passed the conversations on, as verbatim as I can, to the relevant governmenty people but they can do nothing and I can do nothing. The only person that can do anything is a female applicant, if they don't get accepted, and it's shown that this is due to discrimination.

Pretty sure there's nothing more I can do at this point :( Very, very angry and feeling utterly powerless.