Is asking a female interviewee, "How would you feel about working in a group of all men" acceptable?

[ctaylors6]

33. Why did he ask the question?

Do you think he was trying to discourage her? If so, then my answer would be that's a big huge no-no.

Or was he trying to prevent wasting time of both interviewee and company? I could see how it could be a very poorly worded way of advising an interviewee that she'd have an all-male team reporting to her in case SHE had a problem with it. No one, including an interviewee, likes to go through a whole, long interviewing process only to find out there's some kind of deal-breaker that could have been disclosed early on in the interviewing process.

If it's the latter case, I still think the question was not properly asked. But if the guy who asked the question had good intentions, as I think you said in other post, someone from human resources or legal should give him some guidelines on these kinds of interviewing issues for the future. I've seen even well-trained managers get tripped up interviewing someone and ask a question they really shouldn't like this.