I don't know. I (maybe I am wrong) have been intending to treat team-members as "some dudes with bumps on their chest that may have various after hours habits that are none of my concern".
In aggregate, upstream, you are saying: 1) No: I am not treating them equally, even if I think I am, and 2) Females have some real needs/concerns that I should care about.
Now that I know that I am inadequate to this task - what should I do to be better?
>I (maybe I am wrong) have been intending to treat team-members as "some dudes with bumps on their chest that may have various after hours habits that are none of my concern".
FWIW, this is personally my ideal working environment. I can't speak for women in general, and I'm not a moral authority, but this is exactly the kind of treatment I want from my coworkers.
>what should I do to be better?
I don't know, honestly. I know that's an inadequate response, but I'm not sure how to appropriately address ingrained societal sexism either. As far as subconscious bias in hiring goes, having rubrics and standardized interviews goes a long way at eliminating it. I'd theorize that standardized metrics for performance reviews would help on that front, too, though I don't think that's been studied.
If you browse the million and one women in tech posts out there you can see people talking about it at length, though I would be wary of taking somebody's opinion as truth just because they're female, and I would be doubly wary of taking a tech blogger at her word vs an actual female engineer. Your personal set of ethics re: equality of opportunity vs outcome also plays into what you "should do" quite a lot. Some suggestions (like formalized hiring rubrics) are completely valid whether or not you believe in equality of opportunity vs outcome, but others (like instituting diversity quotas in hiring) are not.
And this personal anecdote is a positive story, which I think is just good to keep in mind (that not all individual women necessarily feel or have been through the standard negative Women in Tech narrative): http://lea.verou.me/2015/12/my-positive-experience-as-a-woma...
Maybe its my interpretation, but it seems that you are in favor of equality of outcome and tools like affirmative action. I have always wondered what proponents for it thinks if it was to be used in gender equal language, like if government would have a policy to always use affirmative action for work groups that has less than 40% women or men. A lot of professions have above 90% of a single gender (a trend that has been increasing in the last 30 years), and universal use of affirmative action would cause a lot of movement from typical male or female professions.
In aggregate, upstream, you are saying: 1) No: I am not treating them equally, even if I think I am, and 2) Females have some real needs/concerns that I should care about.
Now that I know that I am inadequate to this task - what should I do to be better?