[venomsnake]

He didn't want them hired for their expertise. More as an "assistants" with emphasis on the first syllable.

But having gender balanced workplace is indeed a perk. A few of my friends (female) that work in female only environments usually say stuff like viper nest (on bad days) or hen house (on good ones). And when in 2004 after my insistence to hire a girl on the dev team in my then company the workplace become much more civil, the language somewhat tamer, the general tidiness of the rooms increased and because she was awesome slow and steady coder the quality of the shipped code increased a lot.