[notalaser]

Full disclosure: white dude, not a minority of any kind in my country.

Five years ago, I would have said that the percentage of women in an office isn't necessarily a good indicator of anything. Nowadays, this would be my first advice: ask how many women work there.

With maybe one exception, all the places I've worked in that had very few women were terrible places to work in. Most of them were unpleasant to work in even for men who think "bro" is not a word to be uttered after you turn 19.

Teams that have a strong bias against women act on it almost universally: they drive candidates away with shitty and/or unenthusiastic interviews and they make life hard for those candidates who do get through. They don't end up with all-male teams just because reputation preceeds them and no woman wants to work there -- they end up with all-male teams because prejudice and insecurity tend to tip the balance of their hiring decisions, too.

It's not a universal predictor, but I definitely consider it a red flag. Frankly, it's one that I look at, too. I'm not the SJW type, but when I got into this whole programming thing, hacker communities used to be inclusive and diverse, and I kind of like to keep that going.

[smilesnd]

Full disclosure: white dude

I would just add make sure you specify that they actually do technical work, and you would be working with them. One job I got I would say 80% of the cube farm were women. The only down side was they were all data entry people, and not treated well. The turn over rate was amazing. The 2 females on my team weren't actually doing technical work and was more or less just adopted into the team because they sat near us. I stayed for as long as my contract stated and left asap.

[nothrabannosir]

At what scale does this advice start? I worked for and with a few almost-all-male startups that just hadn't run into female hires in their first year / ±10 employees. Great work environments, ended up hiring women in the following years.

[striking]

Yeah, if the company is less than ten people, I'd say that's probably fine. Even though it hasn't been all too difficult for our team (<5 people) to find women and people of color as interns or employees, I'm certain it can be more difficult for teams that aren't as lucky as we are.

I think the parent poster meant companies that have had a chance to choose from a large and diverse group of people; but have ended up hiring people of only one, less diverse group anyway; whether by making poor choices or by driving away the other groups of people.

[notalaser]

Good point -- that's one of the reasons why I think it's "just" a red flag. The one place that I mentioned what exactly like that -- small company, couldn't afford too much wage, hiring mostly students or fresh graduates, often based on recommendations. The structure of the team was largely a reflection of our own social networks and of the bias inherent in hiring third-year students. For almost an year, it was a six-man effort. There was only one woman in our team.

[roguecoder]

After "5" I figure it's got momentum and/or reflects a structural problem with recruiting, and either way it is going to become much harder to fix in the future.