[jonstjohn]

As somebody who is in a hiring position and aspires to a more gender-balanced work-place, I've found it really disheartening that so few applicants are female. We have mostly male developers and leadership, so I understand that a female coming into our office might not feel particularly attracted to it. I guess it is a slow process to try to improve that situation.

[tekalon]

I don't think that having mostly men as coworkers is a deterrent. I had a conversation with a co-worker about general work life in our company. There are no work from home opportunities and no paid time off for maternity leave. Most of my (male and female) coworkers like the idea of a work from home or alternative work schedule (4x10 or 9x9 days) but only women commented about better maternity practices. Don't be disheartened by the few number of applicants, that's more due to there being less women in general with the skills needed. I agree don't hire for token numbers, but work on retention, see what keeps them.

Also work with community to encourage both boys and girls into your field. Women get discouraged not when its time to find a job, it starts when they are learning what they are supposed to do (good and bad of gender roles).

[baddox]

The problem is that some discrimination of applicants based on "culture" reasons are considered acceptable, while others aren't. For example, it would be generally be considered acceptable for a fast-iterating early-stage startup to not hire a competent engineer who is more comfortable with longer release cycles that are highly-spec'd and polished, but unacceptable to not hire a competent engineer who is much older than the rest of the team, even though both engineers might not fit into the team's culture and therefore both hires might hurt team productivity.

[belorn]

A previous discussion on HN mentioned good successes with out-reach programs. It seems the best method to get a larger number of female applicants, and it thankfully work fine without the need of affirmative action or other similar sexist methods.