[smokey_the_bear]

I also interned at Microsoft in college, and I'm sure the only reason I got the internship was because I'm a girl. MS hired only five interns from my school that year, and all were female, which is pretty remarkable given my school's sub 5% female representation. I also had an offer from IBM's Extreme Blue that summer, which I don't think had much to do with being female.

I also think being female made it a little easier to get my resume noticed, coming from a large state school. It probably helped me get my Google interview, but I don't think it actually helped me get the job much.

There have also been some negative things about being a woman in technology. Everyone has their advantages and disadvantages in life.

[glaak]

Also, think through what it would mean to actually get the offer (not the interview -- the offer itself) because you were female. Your recruiter isn't deciding who is getting an offer; the individual teams are. So how would this collaboration have happened such that only women from your college were given offers? Remember that Microsoft still has a very low percent of female engineers, so it's not a company wide policy.

You're telling me that a set of unrelated teams decided interdependently to specifically offer positions to women from your college? Why? Why your college? It just doesn't make sense.

My guess is that there's something much less sinister going on, such as: -- It's just a weird coincidence. (After all, they recruit from many schools.) -- Some professor referred mostly female students, perhaps even being under the mistaken impression that they were asking for good female candidates. -- The female students are your schools are actually more qualified than the male. (This is not particularly unlikely, if your school is really less than 5% female. To get numbers that low, there may be some pressure to drop out, leaving only the best women there.) -- Microsoft hires mostly PMs from your school, which are more likely than devs to be female. -- Microsoft extended offers to a number of men too, who happened to not take the offer. -- Many of these 5 students were actually given offers for a specific program dedicated to minorities. -- You're wrong about the percent of women in your CS program (very likely). -- You're wrong about the number of women / men hired.

These are just a few of the possibilities I can think of. What seems incredibly unlikely is that a bunch of unrelated teams all decided to hire only women from specifically your university. I just don't understand how that would work.

By the way, are you sure your school is <5% female? That is WAY under the national average.

[smokey_the_bear]

I was in the Computer Engineering program at my school. There are gender statistics here going back to 2003/2004 - http://www.ece.iastate.edu/the-department/key-performance-in...

2003/2004 was 8.7% female in that program, but that was after my year. The statistic I remembered from around 2000 was 4%. Three of the five MS interns that year were also Cpr E, the other two might have been computer science, for which I don't know the ratio. I don't think there was conspiracy among groups at MS to only hire women, I think the only people from my school who got interviews that year were women. And my impression was that MS handles intern recruiting differently than fulltime.

[glaak]

It is unusual that all 5 people hired were female. But, remember that coincidences happen. There are plenty of schools in which all 15 people hired are male. Unless there is some reason why your school specifically would be set apart, I don't think this is anything more than a strange coincidence.

It's possible that something in the middle is going on -- a recruiter asked a professor for recommendations and he/she happened to recommend mostly women.

[btilly]

If the presented figures are true, the probability of that happening entirely independently by chance are about 0.3 in a million.

It is reasonable to conclude that those decisions were not independent. But you're absolutely right that the correlation may come from the school rather than from Microsoft.

[smokey_the_bear]

I'm pretty sure the recruiter assigned to my school was specifically a diversity recruiter.