One possible reason I came up with however in defense of the women who said this (yeah, old habit) is maybe this is more relevant in VP / CEX level hiring processes were I guess a certain amount of socializing takes place before contracts are signed?

The big problem is that the margin of error for judging an individual case on such factors is enormous. If the CEO is a guy and has daughters then there's a 16% chance he will treat his female employees better, or close the wage gap by 3%, than he did before having daughters. If not, then... what? The stat is only applicable to "CEOs that have daughters"... how do you compare with other kids of CEOs? If you are not careful, your brain will start filling in the gaps, creating false correlations, and worse yet, feel encouraged to look for or come up for more, even less substantiated correlations. It's a very slippery slope.

Or maybe I'm only saying all this because a long time ago, I thought the fact that my future CEO liked to play the violin meant he cared about the art we were going to produce. You won't believe what happened next! ;)

It is a lot more complicated than that. My ex was very idealistic and sincerely saw himself as pro women's lib, yet we had this 1950's style marriage. And he just could not follow basic logic concerning things keeping me trapped in "barefoot and pregnant" mode (so to speak).

I would talk about wanting to go to college and live elsewhere during the week and see him on weekends since he hardly saw me M-F anyway and there wasn't an acceptable local college that met my needs, and he would accuse me of trying to destroy the marriage. I would note that his job frequently took him away from the family and he would rebut that with "Someone has to support the family." He just could not see that this was sexist -- that the reason he had a career and I did not was because if his job took him away from the family, well, that was to be expected. If my ambitions took me away from the family, that was somehow nefarious, traitorous behavior and "LA LA LA NOT SEXISM, this is merely because I am the breadwinner and you are the homemaker, that's all." (Insert huge eyerolls here.)

We divorced for other reasons. He's a great guy in many ways. But there were things he just could not wrap his brain around.

So if the guy has a little wifey at home, even if he means well and is idealistic, you can find yourself dealing with this kind of shit. And it may not get any better (unless he gets divorced and remarries or something -- my ex apparently learned to cook after we divorced, shock of shockers).

This is the sort of thing women routinely deal with that creates problems because having to explain to your boss that this is even a problem for you is such a huge and fundamental issue.

If you want to know how your possible-future boss treats the women he works with, how about, "Have you had any women report to you? How'd that work out? Were there conflicts, and if so, how did you resolve them? Do you think they'd be happy to work for you again?" I'd be happy to answer those questions. Asking what my wife does for a living will get you a very awkward, "Er, let's get back to the interview."

But I'll also point out a big problem with your suggested other questions: employers know that this is a hot-button issue for some prospective employees, and they will adjust their answers accordingly. There is a right answer when a female interviewee asks "Would your previous female reports be happy to work for you again?" - could you imagine anyone answering "No, actually they hate my guts"? And so the only way to get accurate information is to either ask indirect questions, or to ask them to indirect people (eg. finding other women who have worked for this person and asking them what they thought, which is suggested elsewhere in the thread).

Same reason that no sane employer gives interviews that consist of asking "Do you think you're a good employee?", and only slightly better is "Tell me why I should hire you" or "Tell me about your biggest weakness". Sure, you'll get an answer, but it's very likely to be a.) predictable and b.) not highly correlated with how you eventually evaluate their job performance.

Candidates need to do the same thing: delve, ask for details, and keep going until they're satisfied that they know whether this is a job they want. I think those questions I posted are a good way to do that. If OP asks those questions, and then asks follow-ups, until she's pretty well convinced that this is/isn't someone she wants to work for, my suspicion is she'll very likely be right.

But I'll point out that what you're actually building, with the procedure you suggest, is a mental model of how a candidate is likely to perform in a role, given the information that you can find out about them. It is still a model, and you make a number of assumptions in it (notably, that past performance may predict future results, and that a candidate's description of how they handled a project is actually how they handled it, and that information about how they handled it is more predictive than asking them to do a shortened project in front of you). Some of those assumptions I'd agree with, some of them I wouldn't. My point is that these two questions are ones that a couple different women I know have found predictive of how a manager will treat them, and that these women are fairly high-up in their careers and generally satisfied with them. They are not necessarily the questions I would use, but because I will never be in the situation that they or the OP is in, they are probably a lot more relevant to the OP's situation than any mental models I use.

The second question further assumes that the boss is in a heterosexual relationship...

In my opinion, these questions are problematic in a number of ways (my other big beef with them is that they discriminate based on characteristics that the manager has no control of, which don't directly measure the attribute you're looking for). Nevertheless, employers make snap judgments about potential employees all the time based on indirect-yet-predictive attributes; it's not unfair for prospective employees to do the same thing about their potential employer.