[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.