What Women in Tech Really Want from an Employer

Survey responses collected directly from women in software engineering, spanning individual contributors and managers with up to a decade of experience, surface concrete patterns in what makes recruiting outreach land or fall flat.

On where candidates look and how they judge a company before ever speaking to a recruiter:

• LinkedIn dominates as the primary job search channel, with referrals and company career pages as strong secondary sources, meaning career site content and SEO deserve real attention.
• Candidates research employer branding independently through Glassdoor and Google before responding to any message, so public-facing information carries weight long before an interview is scheduled.
• Leadership demographics matter more than team demographics alone. Candidates want to know how many women hold senior roles, not just how many appear somewhere in the org chart, and padding numbers with HR-wide statistics rather than engineering-specific ones is a common misstep.

On outreach language and tone:

• Messages that frame a candidate's gender as the reason for outreach, rather than their skills, are consistently named as the worst kind of email received.
• Word choice tested against candidate reactions shows "collaborative" scoring highest, "challenging" splitting opinion in ways worth ab-testing, and "courageous" landing poorly.
• Contrary to older research claiming women only apply when they meet every listed qualification, most surveyed said they apply anyway, so clear, honest requirements matter more than softened language.

On interview process and benefits:

• Diverse interview panels build trust, but candidates say they weight comments from current female engineers far above reassurances from recruiters or hiring managers.
• A separate, low-pressure conversation with an employee, explicitly framed as candidate-driven rather than evaluative, gives people room to ask what they actually want to know.
• Upfront salary ranges and honesty about pay equity build confidence even when a company can't offer top-of-market compensation, especially when paired with clarity on work-life balance and parental leave.
• Inclusive benefits language, covering transition care and support for disabilities alongside parental leave, signals organizational values even to candidates the specific benefit doesn't apply to.

Smaller details also came up repeatedly: recruiters who can't answer basic questions about team demographics lose credibility fast, and something as simple as pronouns in an email signature was flagged as meaningful.