I have left a company because they flat-out refused to consider hiring women for coding jobs, with the CEO saying that women are too fragile for critical roles.
This kind of idiocy is relatively common in UK executives, as a fairly large chunk of them went to exclusive private boys schools and so never had to really deal with women as equal peers until adulthood.
Wouldn't they get that exposure during university though? I certainly had long-held views challenged and changed during my time in college, where I was exposed to a much larger spectrum of the population compared to my predominantly Caucasian, upper-middle class upbringing.*
* I briefly attended a UK postgraduate institution.
Was at Cambridge. There are no male-only colleges and two (iirc) female only colleges. Can't speak for Oxford, but I suspect a similar situation.
That being said, I'm not sure what the gender ratios are at the historically all male colleges. Perhaps they are not close to 50:50 (apparently this is the case with US business schools, where the ratios are often 65:35, and often have a bro/fratty feel to them)
This kind of idiocy is relatively common in UK executives, as a fairly large chunk of them went to exclusive private boys schools and so never had to really deal with women as equal peers until adulthood.