Is it okay to ask how many women are on the team I'd be working with?

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Dec 21, 2013, 9:03 PM UTC

yummyfajitas wrote: post #8

timr wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That comment served no productive purpose toward answering the question. Even if the response were "because I hate men" , the original question would stand: is it OK to ask if there are any other women on the team? Yes, of course it is. It was plainly made to imply that the asker is being somehow unreasonable for even caring about the question at all.

Asking the motivation behind a question is often helpful in solving the underlying problem . For example, a junior programmer I was working with once asked me how to store arrays in Postgres. I asked why she wanted to, and a non-answer was the most useful reply: "CREATE TABLE a_many_to_many_b ( a_id BIGINT REFERENCES(a.id), b_id BIGINT REFERENCES(b.id))." (Skipping indices, constraints.) In any case, I'll ask again -…

Post by BerislavLopac » Mon, Dec 23, 2013, 12:15 AM UTC

timr wrote: post #20

BerislavLopac wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course it is not OK to ask that. Would it be OK to ask "how many Asian people is there on the team"?

If you were asian? Yes, absolutely. This is a woman asking how many women are on the team. It's completely relevant to her interests.