As a postdoctoral fellow studying diversity and inclusion at Stanford University’s Clayman Institute for Gender Research, Alison Wynn is abundantly aware of the gender diversity gaps that continue to impact the modern workplace. Still, as she prepared to investigate tech recruiting sessions a number of years ago at an unnamed West Coast campus, she was expecting to encounter a fairly tame dataset. Her more significant worry, from a research perspective, was that she’d find nothing at all. “It’s going to be so scripted,” her research advisor cautioned, echoing her own concerns. “Company executives know they’re on display. It’s going to be sanitized.”
