Reading this it strikes me again that hiring managers (men & women) have to get out of the way of women with children or women that are reentering the workforce. Personally, I always hire women on my teams and I have been doing it before the latest movements. I do it for many reasons but two reasons always seem to play out true.<p>First, women in general have a different way of thinking about and viewing problems, this different view forces better, more complete thought patterns from the team. This means we will wind up with a more well thought out solution in the end and we will have considered more sides of the problem. Also, women make up a large percentage of the population, so when designing systems it makes sense to pay attention to how they might process a UX differently and take that into consideration.<p>Second, women bring a stabilizing quality to teams, especially predominately male engineering teams.
Their sheer presence and different viewpoints removes some of the ego and bravado from positions and generally the teams find the result faster because we spend less time playing who's the silver back today.<p>To be fair, I have noticed that today's younger male population IMO is a lot better by not being as ego driven and they do seem to get team play better in many ways than prior generations. Although there are always exceptions, I do think that younger men today are better at being inclusive of women and really anyone that has traditionally been excluded for their views, beliefs, preferences or biology.<p>Last soap box item from me. One other thing about hiring women who are mothers I have learned. They are masters at organization in general, and they get chaos and how to tame it. I can take a good mother that has no degree and she is generally better at leading a group of people than a recent MBA grad. Of course there are no absolutes, but it is a pretty solid general rule.