Hmm, when we made our first female hire (we are a computer games company), she was a graduate and I did point out that everyone else was male. We offered her the job. She accepted it. She mentioned whilst working she wished more girls worked here so she had someone to talk about girl related things with and go out shopping at lunchtime (it turned out one of the males here knew about shellac nails after this comment and they had a chat about it). Ultimately she moved onto a bigger company a year or so later (the male/female balance wasn't given as a reason, the new job was something excited her a lot more).

I think saying 'can you HANDLE being in a mostly male work environment' is not the right wording. But the decision I took to let a potential candidate know they would be working in an otherwise male only office, I would take again in the same circumstance - it WAS something she was interested to know and WAS something that also came up when she started the job.

I can't speak on behalf of any other women, or scenario in the world, the above is the account of what happened to us. We typically get at least 10X more male candidates to female, and we employ and the same ratio. For about half of the jobs we recruit for, the personal doing the interviewing is female.

Thank you for this honest real-world example. For the sake of context, I am also showing a bit of my bias concerning the issue of masculine frat culture that I myself have had the displeasure of being exposed to at previous start-ups. It was really uncomfortable, I could barely get work done and much of the sales hiring was pushing the culture of the company in that direction.

I perfectly understand the innocence of the question and can empathize with both scenarios: one where the candidate is frustrated by seemingly not being taken seriously, and one where the candidate is genuinely interested in knowing and hoping she can find someone to relate to.

Finding out if you fit into the social norms and groups is really really hard when you're an adult.

Stupid people are everywhere. I want to think that there is a big amount of people that is not like that.

As a male I was told something similar in an interview at Google: if I would mind to work in a company where most people are men? And as the girl you cite I found the question stupid. I have worked in tech I already know how is this.

Instead of diversity program to hire women we should create tolerance programs for everybody.

That, or employers should up their professionalism. Bring back the 9-5 job, the clean desk policy, the grumpy boss that will chew you out if you come to work wearing shorts.

How does that signal for professionalism? How does that make a healthier workplace culture? It just becomes a management minefield. People can commit crimes in suits too.

Developer cultures in the 60s and 70s were more corporate, but some of them managed to be more diverse, because the default expectation was "professional adult", not "funky post-student", and "professional adult" is a bigger space that supports access by a broader range of people.

Women started finding it harder to get into CS in the 80s. Until then, the historical record is that diversity was better than it is now.

But generally hiring-process solutions to this problem are hopeless. You either have a diverse culture, in which case markers for age, gender, attractiveness, charm, ethnicity, extraversion, and so on, are irrelevant... or you don't.

Tech generally doesn't - and that starts at school, not during hiring.

Adding a few extra women won't change that. It's a small improvement at best, not a revolution in accessibility.

Because the reality is that even with a 50:50 gender split startup culture would still be primarily white-or-asian, young, attractive, middle class, and motivated by a very small selection of possible ethical positions - and a lot of possible talent would still be excluded.

Age, race, and class discrimination is far more obvious to outsiders than gender discrimination.

You could make the "Well it's still an improvement" argument, and that's true - up to a point. There's still a bigger conversation to be had about inequality in general, and I'm not sure how many people in tech of any gender are interested in having it.

Ageism happens for more or less same reasons. Perceived bias that older people can't work hard enough, or change fast enough with the fast changing time.

Tech is a very fast moving space with a lot of premium attached to entrepreneurship, moving fast enough, failing often etc.

This sort of an environment is very hard for almost everybody to survive through.

The funny part to me was that when I graduated, in the early 2000 after the crash, the meme about getting a job in tech was "You need 10 years of experience to get an entry level job".

There was a strong bias for older workers. Eventually people said "fuck it", made their own startups, hired their newly graduate colleagues, and started making a big push about why younger tech workers were better.

Since the pipeline is growing (more and more people are going in tech), new grads around that time easily outnumbered the older ones, and thus the situation we're in now. It's almost a backlash to what happened back then.

Anecdatum:

My grandfather always shares his stories about leading the development team at Lewis (an old English insurance corporation) and British Gas.

In his view, they were slothenly, unkempt, often unwashed and unsuited nerds. They were allowed to be because they did a job nobody else at the time could do- and while the rest of the office was suite/tie/polished shoes- they showed a flagrant and blatant disregard for that. Because they knew that they could get away with it because they were "needed".

This is why he has a respect for me being clean/polite/respectful while "having the same skills" in his mind.

So I don't fully buy that tech was previously more professional; it might be a different culture in SV, but generally tech is as professional as anything outside of finance in the cities I've worked (in europe)

And my counter-argument to that is:

Why does it matter what the employee dresses or looks like, if they produce the same results?

I have never understood the reason for people forcing their views of how people should dress onto others. It is absurd.

Granted, there are levels of what is 'appropriate' for the workplace, but I think generally having a flexible dress code is important for employee morale.

> Developer cultures in the 60s and 70s were more corporate ..

Because only biiig and serious corps had the dough to play with mainframes. IBM, AT&T, Nokia, Alcatel, Ericsson are still very corporate. The world has changed a bit since then. (The Cold War changed how people view openness and sharing, the Vietnam Wwar (and recently Iraq) changed how people related to the Establishment (and the "military-industrial complex"), and big corporations. Openness became important and "cool" again.)

And CS is small even today, but it was much smaller. Only the very determined, rather serious people were doing software development. And the projects were much more "serious" back then. Waterfall development model, etc.

Diversity was better, about 36% of CS grads were women. Still long before the big Information Age explosion (.com boom, and so on).

And nowadays when you need a gadget or a website you don't need a professional big corporate project, you need just a few guys-gals.

> But generally hiring-process solutions to this problem are hopeless. You either have a diverse culture, in which case markers for age, gender, attractiveness, charm, ethnicity, extraversion, and so on, are irrelevant... or you don't.

Agreed. But if you want to ensure a transition from bad culture to good culture, you might need to start brute force hiring for it. But usually companies that lack good culture are allowed to rot because someone at the top doesn't care.

> There's still a bigger conversation to be had about inequality in general, and I'm not sure how many people in tech of any gender are interested in having it.

People much better off than the average "for some reason" find it "not their problem". Of course, some do, and try to maximize their impact (see effective altruism).

Wishful thinking unfortunately :/ Hence the exodus.