If you can't hire any female engineers, part of the reason may be that you don't already have any. This can be a huge red flag. Basically, most women applying

If you can't hire any female engineers, part of the reason may be that you don't already have any. This can be a huge red flag. Basically, most women applying for the job want to have some assurance that they're going to be respected and their concerns taken seriously, and the best way to demonstrate that this is true is by having some women on your team. Otherwise, the question just sits out there: why don't you have any? Is it coincidence, or is there something wrong with your culture? (Disclaimer: I'm a man, but I know a lot of female engineers. I obviously can't speak for all of them, but I've noticed some trends.) Many women in engineering are wary of situations in which they won't be taken seriously. For example: say there's one guy on your team who tends to patronize women, especially ones he finds attractive. He might not realize he does this. You have a female engineer who's getting fed up with this behavior, and tries to gently (because she's experienced this before) point this out. He gets defensive -- maybe he says she IS different than the other engineers, so it's only natural, maybe he just gets angry, whatever -- but, whatever he does, it's not an honest effort to improve. Later, she tries to bring this up with someone else on the team, look for help, but to everyone else he's always been a nice guy, so why is she making trouble? Or let's say someone illustrates a presentation with some unfortunate images or metaphors. (Where have we seen this before?) Nothing flagrantly unconscionable, but, you know, kind of skirting the edge of acceptability. This makes a female engineer uncomfortable -- the presentation marginalizes her, makes her wonder if the team sees her as a colleague or an object of desire. Now, she knows it's going to end badly, but she mentions that it made her uncomfortable, and asks that everyone please try to avoid that mode of presentation in the future. And suddenly everyone on the team is explaining, no, he didn't mean in THAT way, the presentation wasn't REALLY about her -- well, if you hadn't marginalized her before, now you definitely have. It doesn't have to be that way. But in some places, it is. I've talked to women looking for software engineering jobs, and this is definitely something that gets considered. Are other women willing to work there? Willing to stay? Will they have anyone to back them up when shit happens? Because when the answer is "no", life sucks. That said, I don't know how you hire the first one. But you've got to be aware of these things. You've got to make completely sure that you look like someplace where women will be respected and taken seriously, not marginalized and undermined. Because, if a good female candidate gets a whiff of that, she's probably gone.