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Such line of questions would pretty much disqualify you in my eyes, regardless if I'm the interviewer or the candidate. Not just because of the improperly personal nature, but also they require a lot of assumptions and random chances in order to be remotely considered useful. Note that I'm not challenging the statistical correlation with certain outcomes, but I'm questioning the mindset of someone who would use them to make a decision.

Upvoted. I'll tell about my family sometime later.

One possible reason I came up with however in defense of the women who said this (yeah, old habit) is maybe this is more relevant in VP / CEX level hiring processes were I guess a certain amount of socializing takes place before contracts are signed?

Socializing may happen at all levels, for example if the candidate is taken out to lunch. In that context the information may come out.

The big problem is that the margin of error for judging an individual case on such factors is enormous. If the CEO is a guy and has daughters then there's a 16% chance he will treat his female employees better, or close the wage gap by 3%, than he did before having daughters. If not, then... what? The stat is only applicable to "CEOs that have daughters"... how do you compare with other kids of CEOs? If you are not careful, your brain will start filling in the gaps, creating false correlations, and worse yet, feel encouraged to look for or come up for more, even less substantiated correlations. It's a very slippery slope.

Or maybe I'm only saying all this because a long time ago, I thought the fact that my future CEO liked to play the violin meant he cared about the art we were going to produce. You won't believe what happened next! ;)

I think we agree. I just tried to come up with an explanation as to why this would be suggested.

Wow. I would decline to answer any question related to my family or family situation. It's inappropriate for the interviewer to ask this of a candidate and the reverse is equally inappropriate.

The reason for asking about whether the wife works outside the home is that in two-career couples, the husband necessarily needs to take on a larger share of the housework & childcare, which makes them more sympathetic to the constraints & sacrifices that a working mother has to make.

It is a lot more complicated than that. My ex was very idealistic and sincerely saw himself as pro women's lib, yet we had this 1950's style marriage. And he just could not follow basic logic concerning things keeping me trapped in "barefoot and pregnant" mode (so to speak).

I would talk about wanting to go to college and live elsewhere during the week and see him on weekends since he hardly saw me M-F anyway and there wasn't an acceptable local college that met my needs, and he would accuse me of trying to destroy the marriage. I would note that his job frequently took him away from the family and he would rebut that with "Someone has to support the family." He just could not see that this was sexist -- that the reason he had a career and I did not was because if his job took him away from the family, well, that was to be expected. If my ambitions took me away from the family, that was somehow nefarious, traitorous behavior and "LA LA LA NOT SEXISM, this is merely because I am the breadwinner and you are the homemaker, that's all." (Insert huge eyerolls here.)

We divorced for other reasons. He's a great guy in many ways. But there were things he just could not wrap his brain around.

So if the guy has a little wifey at home, even if he means well and is idealistic, you can find yourself dealing with this kind of shit. And it may not get any better (unless he gets divorced and remarries or something -- my ex apparently learned to cook after we divorced, shock of shockers).

I meant it (well, they did...I'm just passing along conclusions) the other way around - having a boss where the wife has a career equal to his is a positive indication, while having one with a stay-at-home wife is a negative indication. The idea is that someone who has chosen to marry and stay married to a career woman is quite literally putting his money where his mouth is when it comes to women's equality: he's making concrete sacrifices with his time to ensure that housework & childcare is split between partners, because otherwise it just wouldn't get done. And because of this, he's more likely to be understanding & empathetic when faced with employees who have to make the same trade-offs.

Oh, I know which way you meant it. I was agreeing with you and saying "Men with old fashioned marriages are often incapable of putting their money where their mouth is, no matter how much they would like to see themselves as enlightened and egalitarian. It is a dance they may have zero experience with. Imagining they can do this dance and actually practicing the dance steps is where their ideals and their choices part company."

Is there any actual evidence of this?

It was anecdotal, and I'm not going to reveal the identities or experiences of the women involved. The OP asked for experiences & advice, and so I passed along as much of the experience & advice as I could. If you (or any reader) finds it helpful, great; if you don't, well, ultimately you are the only one responsible for deciding whose advice you act on.

It is a general truism that people with zero experience doing X are incredibly bad at figuring out how on earth to effectively cope with X. It isn't something intentionally malicious, but it can cause all kinds of problems. I recall reading about some group setting up a meeting to try to reach out to Jewish people in the community and scheduling it for a really major Jewish holiday the equivalent of something like Christmas. No Jewish people showed up for this meeting, the whole point of which was "We know so little about what Jewish people in the community want and need that we are soliciting their input and trying to build bridges, but can't even be arsed to check a Jewish calendar before blithely picking a date that works fine for non-Jews."

This is the sort of thing women routinely deal with that creates problems because having to explain to your boss that this is even a problem for you is such a huge and fundamental issue.

[Citation Provided]: http://www.west-info.eu/files/SSRN-id2018259.pdf

It's known as a stereotype. "Men who do not have career wives are trouble/red flags/misogynist pigs." Unfortunately, this stereotype appears to be perfectly acceptable on this board.

This seems like terrible advice to me. "Men with daughters are less sexist" and "Men whose wives work are more sympathetic to working mothers" are extremely vague, only loosely correlated to what you want to know, and pure anecdata. Someone could make up an equally plausible counter-argument (say, "men with young daughters are more likely to infantilize female coworkers"), but it would still just be story-telling.

If you want to know how your possible-future boss treats the women he works with, how about, "Have you had any women report to you? How'd that work out? Were there conflicts, and if so, how did you resolve them? Do you think they'd be happy to work for you again?" I'd be happy to answer those questions. Asking what my wife does for a living will get you a very awkward, "Er, let's get back to the interview."

I will happily acknowledge all of your criticisms, since I agree with them.

But I'll also point out a big problem with your suggested other questions: employers know that this is a hot-button issue for some prospective employees, and they will adjust their answers accordingly. There is a right answer when a female interviewee asks "Would your previous female reports be happy to work for you again?" - could you imagine anyone answering "No, actually they hate my guts"? And so the only way to get accurate information is to either ask indirect questions, or to ask them to indirect people (eg. finding other women who have worked for this person and asking them what they thought, which is suggested elsewhere in the thread).

Same reason that no sane employer gives interviews that consist of asking "Do you think you're a good employee?", and only slightly better is "Tell me why I should hire you" or "Tell me about your biggest weakness". Sure, you'll get an answer, but it's very likely to be a.) predictable and b.) not highly correlated with how you eventually evaluate their job performance.

Have you done many interviews? The solution to "people lie sometimes" is not to rely on correlation-to-a-correlation Ouija board bullshit, it's to delve and ask for more detail until you're satisfied the person isn't bullshitting. I want to know if candidates are smart and hard-working; I don't ask them "Are you smart and hard-working", and I don't ask them what their spouse does for a living based on some cockamamie theory about how that relates to anything. I ask them to describe a project they worked on and their role in it and how it went, and I keep asking supporting questions and follow-ups until I'm pretty sure I know whether I want to hire them or not.

Candidates need to do the same thing: delve, ask for details, and keep going until they're satisfied that they know whether this is a job they want. I think those questions I posted are a good way to do that. If OP asks those questions, and then asks follow-ups, until she's pretty well convinced that this is/isn't someone she wants to work for, my suspicion is she'll very likely be right.

Again, I don't disagree with you. I will never be in a situation like the OP is asking for, because I'm male and so "how will my manager treat women?" is not a question that is professionally relevant to me. When I do interview employers, my procedure is largely as you suggest, except focused on engineering practices, capital structure, runway, and the specific role I'll be fulfilling in the company.

But I'll point out that what you're actually building, with the procedure you suggest, is a mental model of how a candidate is likely to perform in a role, given the information that you can find out about them. It is still a model, and you make a number of assumptions in it (notably, that past performance may predict future results, and that a candidate's description of how they handled a project is actually how they handled it, and that information about how they handled it is more predictive than asking them to do a shortened project in front of you). Some of those assumptions I'd agree with, some of them I wouldn't. My point is that these two questions are ones that a couple different women I know have found predictive of how a manager will treat them, and that these women are fairly high-up in their careers and generally satisfied with them. They are not necessarily the questions I would use, but because I will never be in the situation that they or the OP is in, they are probably a lot more relevant to the OP's situation than any mental models I use.

> this assumes a male boss

The second question further assumes that the boss is in a heterosexual relationship...

...and that they have kids. The women in question were actually called on this by another childless woman within the community, pointing out that single & childless employees may still also have family obligations or other reasons they have to leave work at a set time.

In my opinion, these questions are problematic in a number of ways (my other big beef with them is that they discriminate based on characteristics that the manager has no control of, which don't directly measure the attribute you're looking for). Nevertheless, employers make snap judgments about potential employees all the time based on indirect-yet-predictive attributes; it's not unfair for prospective employees to do the same thing about their potential employer.

Whatever works for you but these questions are very rude and unnecessarily intrusive. Imagine the questions with the genders reversed.