Useful job interview questions

Here are some questions that you can ask, as a potential employee, to gauge the friendliness of a work environment to women or other marginalized people.

Career path

• what does your career ladder look like?
• what did the career progression look like for the last woman who held a position like this one?
• how many women have been there for over 2 years?
• how much mobility is there between teams?

Company culture

• what are community meetups that people from the company participate in?
• how many people are entry/mid/late career?
• how well is the company doing regarding diversity?
  • what is the company doing to improve its diversity?

Management

• How does management communicate amongst itself?
• Do they have a well defined organizational chart (that you think makes sense).
• What do they do that supports their staff well? What could use improvement?

Benefits information

In the United States, if there is HR, you can have a HIPAA protected conversation about benefits that they are legally not allowed to share with unauthorized parties. More on this at the HRC site - the information there is specific to asking about gender-identity-related healthcare, but the advice should generalize. There's also the Microactivism Wiki for information specifically about trans-inclusive healthcare coverage here.

Meta

• how do you know if your interview process is working well?
• if I was a terrible fit for this job, how would you know?

See also

Many of David MacIver's suggested questions for interviewing companies are useful:

• Interviewing companies
• Questions for prospective employers