Because interviewers are more likely to be condescending to someone they don't respect, and many of them don't respect women.
Yes, this stuff happens to many people, not just women. But it happens to them on an alarmingly regular basis.
Yes, this stuff happens to many people, not just women. But it happens to them on an alarmingly regular basis.
This is an easy mistake to make if you are a kernel hacker in an organization that has, say 20% female developers overall, but where only 2% of kernel hackers are women. Easy to make, not malicious, but not much less annoying because of it, specially if you are the 10th person to assume that. From your point of view, it is a very efficient cache prediction strategy, since you'll get it right 90% of the time[1], but from theirs, it means half their queries end up miss-predicted...
[1] Yes, I am assuming 50% of all developers are kernel hackers, you can switch to something more realistic like product vs infra, front vs backend, etc. Also, the point is not about "lower-level systems programming being real-er programming!", but about making assumptions based partly on gender.
In some circles, you will get people who think along the lines of "yeah, of course there is sexism in industry, I mean, look at Bob, he keeps cracking jokes about women and browses The Red Pill at work. But I am not like Bob, I don't have anything against women, I am trying to help, ergo I can't be sexist". Yet these people can be condescending without generally meaning to disrespect or make less on anyone. When confronted with a woman who is very technical and assertive about that fact, they quickly adjust to treat her as technical, but their default assumption still goes to 'relatively less technical than me' when meeting any new female developer (and doesn't when meeting a male college). I was trying to point out that sort of thing is a problem too.
I would suggest this has nothing to do with gender, and that wanting 'less condescending interviews' is merely a gripe about the current state of the entire economy. Not only is it not tech specific, it's not even industry or nation specific.