Ask HN: Women in tech, how do you find non-toxic work environments?

Could you elaborate a little bit more please, beyond the cringey paper-scissor activities?

Second (and I kind of hate to give this one away), I ask "what do you sacrifice when recruiting to ensure diversity?" The answer should be either "it takes us longer to recruit, because we ensure a balanced pool" or "we have changed our process to allow many types of candidates to shine". If the answer is just "we spend lots of money on sending people to Grace Hopper!" it means they aren't willing to inconvenience or piss off overrepresented engineers. You can't fix culture problems by spending money, and when "diversity" is seen as separate from "recruiting" in general it's a clear sign of a problem.

I also use the Internet: I look on LinkedIn for people who have left the company, see how long women stayed and reach out to find out why they left if they did. Backchannel mailing lists are great ways to find a vouch. I check the social media profiles of their prominent engineers and search with keywords like "feminism", "women" and "she". See how they talk about women in the field, whether they follow women on Twitter, whether they posted angry anti-Hillary memes. I've found that a lot more effective than relying on direct questioning, because there are companies out there that will say whatever they think will let them add you as a shield against the accusations of sexism they are facing. Especially my boss: if my boss is going to be a white dude, he had better have publicly condemned sexism in a way that feels constructive and genuine to me.

One other internet trick is to look at where the women you respect are working and apply there. At the very least, you would get to work with technical mentors you admire and can learn from.

You can find good spots here. Seriously, though, trust your instincts, don't be afraid to walk away and don't be afraid to take an "unsexy" job at an old-school company with an HR department.

On the negative side think of the meme of enablers trying to downplay a screamer's actions as merely being passionate about his work, or even worse, the department he manages.

I can't agree with you. If you work for a company that makes negative assumptions about you because of your gender/race, you'll have a worse experience than when they make positive assumptions.

It's about things like when you bring up an idea in a meeting, and it's totally ignored, and the guy across the table brings it up and it's suddenly genius. It's people acting like you always need your hand held even though you're a senior dev. Stuff like that.

While it's true that "white dude" isn't a singular set of traits... what it really comes down, most of all, is what your direct manager assumes about you. They could be biased for/against you for any number of reasons (like what college you went to, your accent, etc). But being biased based on your gender/race is probably one of the most common and strongest.

Furthermore, people who see things the way they do - who don't see their behavior as biased or abnormal - tend to clump together, creating a discriminatory culture. People discriminated against by it tend to leave, so it can be self-reinforcing. Those involved in it don't see a problem - someone they expected to be a bad programmer couldn't handle it and left, from their point of view.

Of course, you can have a terrible culture that sucks for everyone, too. Been there, done that. But there absolutely are situations where certain people/groups are favored and others are not.