It's important to give the right answers to questions, answers that signal the right intentions. Giving the wrong answers means you don't really understand the

It's important to give the right answers to questions, answers that signal the right intentions. Giving the wrong answers means you don't really understand the situation, and aren't really invested in solving the problem. So when a young female applicant asks you a question that might not precisely be worded as "why is your company all men with only the white ones in positions of power," it's important to not frame the reason why this is as a pipeline problem. She's not dumb. She knows that. Because she's not actually asking for the reason. She wants to know if your company has the wherewithal to overcome the diversity problem in spite of the fact that there just aren't a whole lot of women looking for tech careers at present compared to men. Everyone already knows there aren't that many applicants. Everyone knows you can't just hire a woman just because of her gender. That's not the point. The way you answer this question is to, without right out stating there's a pipeline problem, make sure you've put into place all the other pieces that will cause women to not run screaming to all their friends what insensitive clods you are. Talk about your code of conduct. Talk about your contributions to the cause of diversity. Talk about any issue you had in the past relating to you not understanding people that have very very different life circumstances than you and what your failings were in obtaining a resolution satisfactory to all parties. It's hard to talk about but well, diversity is a hard topic. Anything but passing the buck.