By you sharing you have added some good to a bad situation.

I dunno where you all are working but I've never worked on any software team that was exclusively white and male.

My current job in France, 100% male and white, that's about 15 people in the tech team. Entire company has only 2 women, and 100% white. To note that if you look at ethnicity/origins, the company is very diverse: French, German, Dutch, British, American, Spanish, Italian and Swiss.

Disclaimer: Not claiming anything about whiteness, just saying that it's not as uncommon as you might think. Specially in Europe.

Of course, statistically speaking, it was probably only 80-90% white male.

Skewing heavily male I will grant you, but not even close to being majority white in almost all cases.

But that puts it right in line with your average computer science or software engineering cohort at any given university, so I'm really not sure what your problem is.

Like I get you might think it's unfair there aren't more women in software but I'm not sure what you want us to do about that my dude.

We can't just force more girls into software if they aren't interested in it.

Probably like 75% male.

But at most 25% white male.

Nope. It’s a lot whiter than u think https://www.eeoc.gov/special-report/diversity-high-tech

Closest thing I can find that seems relevant in there:

"Compared to overall private industry, the high tech sector employed a larger share of whites (63.5 percent to 68.5 percent), Asian Americans (5.8 percent to 14 percent) and men (52 percent to 64 percent"

First point would be that doesn't really support your contention that 90% of tech employees are white men.

That said, they can't be measuring what we think of as tech; it's certainly more than the claimed 64% male. I'm pretty sure that restricted to actual tech, it would be both more male and less white.

HR roles, like most others, are numbers driven. Recruiters are expected to deliver a number of applicants, interview a number of candidates, etc. This means that yes, they often interview people they have no intention to hire: It makes the HR person look good.

This can happen if they have a diversity hire directive but interview non-diverse candidates, but it can also happen if they want to hire a white guy but have a company directive to interview diverse candidates for every role. Either way, they can say they looked at everyone before hiring whatever candidate they wanted.

Question for this sort of situation: could you send an email to "confirm the case" to your boss and your boss'boss for this? They would need to respond and get this in writing. At that point, if they fire you they will have a big problem, if they don't hire the person, they will still have a big problem.

I understand that it creates a whole set of bad situations, so just asking what's the theoretical appropriate way to handle this

No. Don't do this unless you have a backup job, or can survive fine for a while on unemployment. If you do want to report the behavior, report the pertinent details to the EEOC (or whatever is equivalent for your country).

Wouldn't the company be in big trouble if they fired you after that email?

Why go through all the trouble when they could just make you quit?

Perhaps you could build a case for constructive dismissal if you document everything including the sexism email

They could just not respond at all to the email. They could say the person receiving it didn't understand what the email was asking so deleted it. They could say that the managers never made any such statements and thought the employee (who they would also say had other performance or HR issues) was trying to entrap them, and that they fired the employee for the alleged entrapment.

Document and report. Don't try to catch someone unless you're advised to do so by a lawyer or law enforcement or the like.

Oh sure, I implied to sue only if a response was received