FWIW, the startup I was at seemed to have a soft affirmative action for females. They would reject males that didn't do much outside of college work, but would be willing to consider females with the same resume because "it would be nice to have more female coders".
Culture fit was about a modicum of friendliness. You could get rejected for culture fit by, say, looking away from your interviewer and mumbling to yourself. There could have been some great (and disadvantaged!) candidates with Eyeball Avoidance Syndrome + Tourette's that were rejected unfairly by the process, but so it goes.
The company was still 90% men in engineering, because that's what your talent pipeline looks like. I'm sure they were secret sexists, or something. Valleywag would write a scathing article about them.
In your example, I bet IBM was still predominantly male despite the anecdotal hiring of a few women that you mention.
Culture fit was about a modicum of friendliness. You could get rejected for culture fit by, say, looking away from your interviewer and mumbling to yourself. There could have been some great (and disadvantaged!) candidates with Eyeball Avoidance Syndrome + Tourette's that were rejected unfairly by the process, but so it goes.
The company was still 90% men in engineering, because that's what your talent pipeline looks like. I'm sure they were secret sexists, or something. Valleywag would write a scathing article about them.
In your example, I bet IBM was still predominantly male despite the anecdotal hiring of a few women that you mention.