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:

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