They = an all-male dev team, and it wasn't a complaint. The lead never complained. Probably considered herself very lucky to have landed in a lead role and didn't want to rock the boat. They were all working for an outsourcer who we (the client) had engaged. However, it became apparent to us (the client) that this was happening, in our offices, even if it wasn't to our employees. We did an immediate soft intervention of placing a permanent (non-Indian) colleague into the team in a scrum master type role, who did a great job of facilitating meetings fairly and basically telling the men (boys, frankly) to shut up once in a while. We probably broke a rule by unspokenly deciding that the scrum master had to be non-Indian. Meanwhile, HR cogitated and came to the conclusion that we had no contractual right to invoke any process on the men as they weren't our direct employees. However, we did have the right to ask that people be replaced if we were not satisfied with performance. Cue debate on what constitutes performance. Cue debate on whether the project could take the hit of losing its whole dev team all at once. This all took a long time, as we believed there was a chance that the intervention would work if given time. Maybe this was a teachable moment? And aside from the appalling attitude, they were decent devs with a lot of difficult-to-replace knowledge. Not gonna lie, we hoped the problem would go away if we did the bare minimum "fix". Communication improved, but it was an uphill battle.
As it happened, fate intervened, and wider organizational spasms caused the project to be mothballed. We had to give notice to the whole dev team, including the lead. Fortunately, this was a megacorp, and other projects swiftly moved in, and new work orders were drafted. This gave us an opportunity to approve the team sheet for the outsourced roles. The female tech lead was waved on through. The troglodytes were rejected. The reason was stated. We received a duly grovelling "this will never happen again" response from the account manager. They never worked for us again under my watch, but I believe they were simply rotated on to another client rather than receiving any material comeuppance.
So, they kind of got away with it - but also kind of didn't.
As it happened, fate intervened, and wider organizational spasms caused the project to be mothballed. We had to give notice to the whole dev team, including the lead. Fortunately, this was a megacorp, and other projects swiftly moved in, and new work orders were drafted. This gave us an opportunity to approve the team sheet for the outsourced roles. The female tech lead was waved on through. The troglodytes were rejected. The reason was stated. We received a duly grovelling "this will never happen again" response from the account manager. They never worked for us again under my watch, but I believe they were simply rotated on to another client rather than receiving any material comeuppance.
So, they kind of got away with it - but also kind of didn't.