[yummyfajitas]

Why do you believe a person asking the question is "reflexively defensive"? And what is "the problem" that the person asking is part of?

I don't think I'm the only one who can't understand what you are trying to say. Could you carefully explain your thoughts in detail, making your assumptions and values more explicit?

[timr]

That comment served no productive purpose toward answering the question. Even if the response were "because I hate men", the original question would stand: is it OK to ask if there are any other women on the team? Yes, of course it is.

It was plainly made to imply that the asker is being somehow unreasonable for even caring about the question at all.

[yummyfajitas]

Asking the motivation behind a question is often helpful in solving the underlying problem. For example, a junior programmer I was working with once asked me how to store arrays in Postgres. I asked why she wanted to, and a non-answer was the most useful reply: "CREATE TABLE a_many_to_many_b ( a_id BIGINT REFERENCES(a.id), b_id BIGINT REFERENCES(b.id))." (Skipping indices, constraints.)

In any case, I'll ask again - could you lay out your reasoning in more detail? I really can't figure out how you determined this implication of the question, what "the problem" (as you perceive it to be) is or why you believe it was "defensive".

[BerislavLopac]

Of course it is not OK to ask that. Would it be OK to ask "how many Asian people is there on the team"?

[timr]

If you were asian? Yes, absolutely. This is a woman asking how many women are on the team. It's completely relevant to her interests.

[BerislavLopac]

Bullshit. Would you also argue that it's okay to ask how many white men work there if you were a white man? If it is a job where things like race, gender, age etc have no effect on the work itself, any of those questions are completely inappropriate regardless of who is asking.