>I spend 8hrs a day in an office with my colleagues (sometimes more than with my wife & kid) and the ones I can't stand is about the only thing wrong with my job.
There's plenty of people I would never ever spend time with outside of work, and try to minimize my time with at work.
But that's fine, because 'cthalupa would like to have a beer with you after work' isn't part of the requisites for doing a job on my team. The 'Finding people that fit in with the culture'/'Finding people that I don't mind being around' is how you get monocultures and a lack of diversity in your team.
>If we can't even see the person's face over some gender bias hysteria then I wonder how the hell we got here.
Gender bias is a real thing, a big deal, and certainly not hysteria. There's a lot of ways to reduce it. It doesn't necessarily require never seeing someone's face - though I think automating "skills" related interviews could be a good thing - because you can start with having a structured interview program where you have specific questions to ask and a specific rubric to grade against. Making sure you have solid, unbiased questions, and measure the answers evenly against the same rubric solves the majority of the problem.
>People should just get over the fact that men and women are different.
Well, of course men and women are different. But even for jobs that involve heavy labor, this isn't actually significant - while the average woman has less physical strength than the average man, the type of woman who applies for that sort of job has self-selected into it, and is almost certainly more capable of doing that sort of work than the average woman - meaning it's still not a good indicator even for areas where the differences are largest.
For a white collar job, like the type we're discussing? It's even less relevant. There are extremely few times where you should ever care about gender when it comes to hiring.