> The company was still 90% men in engineering, because that's what your talent pipeline looks like.Same here. I think we've hired all the women who have applied for Dev jobs as we expanded though not because of any positive discrimination (as far as I know, though hiring/firing is out of my remit). All two of them.
I get the impression that women are put off a career in the sort of technical role we need (or, to look at it the other way around, are drawn to other things) fairly early in their education. Those that stick with it are determined so tend to end up making the effort and being damn good, but the rest end up thinking it isn't for them for more so than boys in a similar position. A lot of that is going to be cultural (the "boys toys" attitude mainly) but I see this falling away as personal technology has become much more ubiquitous in the last decade or so with everyone having/wanting flashy phones, tablets, and other techie toys. The proportion of my younger family members' female friends who are specifically/actively interested in a technical profession seems much higher than was the case when I was that sort of age about 18 years ago (though game designer and game tester are the main dreams there, I'm not sure how to tell them about the disparity between their expectations and the level of stress people are under in that part of the industry!).
> I'm sure they were secret sexists. Valleywag would write a scathing article about them.
I think we are pretty much not sexist, or anything-else-ist for that matter, but in a way that might be a problem for some. I don't know if this holds industry wide, but our sense of humour can be quite non-PC though it is applied fairly: all stereotypes (gender, age, country, size, religion, diet, hair, ...) are fair game for a joke and we don't tend to reign it in for any particular group or individual (though we aren't completely heartless in that regard). No harm is meant and no-one has thus far taken offence but I imagine there are some sensitive souls out there who would find it makes for an environment uncomfortable to work in (so one of these days it might cause problems if someone goes too far and someone does take significant offence, I can certainly imagine circumstances where that might happen).