In my experience, I've always found it quite strange that HR and recruitment is a field that seems to me to be female dominated, at least in the part of the UK where I am, and I can't help but feel that the imbalance at this level of the process reflects who gets hired.
100% this. At my company they created all these product manager type roles and fill them w/ women and minorities and then count them as part of the software engineering team to get their diversity numbers up.
I'd agree with the comments that reflect women's skills in networking and team consensus, rather than saying it was because of any sort of diversity quota. I've been at recruiters frequently where it was all-female offices, and, at risk of labouring a cheap point, it's sometimes been difficult to get my technical skills understood, outside of buzzwording.
I'm really skeptical of this. Women as a percentage of the workforce in general isn't low, and just as some fields seem to attract a lot of men, some fields attract a lot of women. Even if you believe that societal pressure is part of this, that still means that by the time you're talking about "who applies to companies for X jobs" there's self-selection at play.
