That anecdote tells you precisely nothing; women who prefer working in all-female teams, etc, etc, have already been weeded out. Talking to people in the industry is sampling from a population of people who probably don't see a problem regardless of the actual situation.

It tells you that the men in the team weren't treating her like crap. And this is exactly what is always discussed, that being a lone woman in a group of men is toxic, discriminating, etc. The women I work with didn't have this issue.

Sure, I read some horror stories, mainly from US. But that doesn't mean that as a women you can't work pleasantly in an all male environment, as my experience clearly shows.

Quote from the parent comment:

> 2 of them separately told me they liked working in an all men team more than working with women.

It's not comparing all-male to all-female teams, but all-male to teams with any women. As you say, There are roughly zero all-female teams in tech[1], but the proportion of any-female teams is much much higher.

[1] Yes, I know there are teams who have explicitly sought after this for ideological reasons, but theyre a rounding error.

> I worked with a few women in software development. 2 of them separately told me they liked working in an all men team more than working with women.

There are far more male bosses than female bosses. Accordingly, assuming bad bosses are relatively rare, it's far more likely every female boss you've ever had is awful than every male boss you've ever had is awful. This is just probability.

Let's take an example. Suppose 10% of bosses are awful, regardless of gender. Further suppose that due historical societal reasons, only 20% of bosses are female. If you've had 3 different bosses in your career, there's a far likelier chance that every female boss you've had is awful (3.94%) than every male boss you've had is awful (1.4%). (I'll leave it as an exercise to derive these numbers).

So, even if men and women are just as likely to be awful, you're nearly 3 times as likely for all of your female bosses to be awful than all of your male bosses to be awful simply due to the fact that women are under-represented.

This probability may explain at least some of this common and sad bias against female bosses.

GP's example didn't say anything about bosses, but rather all-male teams vs teams with >0 women. Your comment is just an extended non sequitur

> GP's example didn't say anything about bosses, but rather all-male teams vs teams with >0 women. Your comment is just an extended non sequitur

It doesn't matter if it's bosses or co-workers, the math works out the same.

No, it doesn't. It would require all-male teams to be substantially more common than teams with 1 or more women. It's not clear to me that this is the case (it's very much not my experience: 1/6 teams I've worked on have been women-free).

> 1/6 teams I've worked on have been women-free

If your average team size is 5 people, then on average, the gender breakdown in your company is 72% male/28% female. I assumed 80/20, so yeah, it's still pretty accurate.

This doesn't hold up to scrutiny, since the opposite situation would also occur. People are also nearly 3 times as like for all of your female bosses to have been good, and exclusively had bad male bosses.

If fact, if 10% of bosses are awful then there will be far more people who have exclusively had good female bosses than bad female bosses.

Someone want to break down how to calculate the odds here?

Assuming gender has no impact on awfulness

P(all your female bossses awful) = P(awful boss)^(number of female bosses)

P(all your male bossses awful) = P(awful boss)^(number of male bosses)

The lower the number of male/female bosses, the greater the probability of all of them being awful. The opposite (probability of all of them being not awful) increasing is also true.

This is generally known as a small numbers fallacy[1]

https://human.libretexts.org/Bookshelves/Philosophy/Book%3A_...

Being in groups of the opposite gender has the benefit that you can opt out of inter-sex competition. Men compete with men. Women with women. A woman working in a otherwise all men team have no other woman to compete with which can be a great freedom. If a person explicitly talked about "jealous and backstabbing" I would interpret it as terminology of inter-sex competition.

Agreement in the form of an anecdatum:

More than one baby-boomer woman I know has said that every time she has a male boss, things are okay, and every time she has a female boss, the whole office gradually goes insane. I'm in particular thinking of my aunt, working in banks (all of her peers were women), but I've heard it elsewhere too.

But then again, it's anecdata. I try not to take it seriously (I mean, I take it seriously about the individual's experience, but not as a description of large-scale patterns). But also when people have just-so stories about how male bosses are toxic to female underlings, I have the same "maybe that was true for you, but I don't see any reason to generalize" reaction.

I am from Europe. I keep hearing the same things. Although it is anecdotal and from other people. At times it seems women have it constantly against each other focusing a lot of their time on social power plays. Myself I work in an environment with 97 percent male ratio so I do not have enough experience to comment on it myself. I would rather have it 50/50 at this point though. I think it would be less boring.