Well, it wasn't run by women when I was there, but the trend was picking up steam...
I went there to guide them through the process of moving from their old original Apollo based development system, and move them to Unix -- basically to get them into the 20th century before it finished.
There were so many issues that I could write a book - but lets just say that they had a product written in C++, before C++ was standardized. Apollo, and HP after them, bent over backwards to make all sorts of unreasonable modifications to the compiler, loader and even the OS to support some of the rather odd ideas that some of the engineering staff there had -- sort of reasonable since Mentor and its customers wrre probably 90% of Apollo sales.
Moving to Unix they wanted to cover a whole range of wierd and wonderful hardware and OS platforms (Sun, HP, DEC, NEC, Sony ... and a few more that I forget).
Of course, none of these had C++ compilers which were anything like standard (because there was no standard), and they didn't support the strange dynamic loading options that were present on Apollo.
So there were problems with bending code to make it work ("But it works perfectly on Apollo!! Its this Unix crap thats broken!!!"). There were endless "discussions" with different OS/HW vendors about the varying levels of brokenness in their C++/loader implementations.
Now all this was sort of expected, and could have actually been an interesting challenge.
But, there was on director who's group had already made the jump to Unix. They had actually done a pretty good job. the problem was the way they had done it just wasn't going to scale, and would have been a royal pain in the future if we had tried to generalize it. This person was pretty upset when I didn't adopt his solution.
I had a discussion with the VP about it, and he basically said "too bad, screw him!".
So I just went ahead.
Then that VP left.
Guess who got his job?
It was too late to back out what I had done, and I think he actually had come to accept the deficiencies in what they had done -- very reasonable and appropriate for a smallish group, but just not right on a larger scale.
Anyway - he made it his job to make my life as unpleasant as possible.
He deliberately screwed up every chance of promotion -- I basically had an engineering director position, which was yanked -- I found out later because he created such a stink about it.
At the same time, they were laying off people. That aways makes life pleasant.
They were going through what I describe as a "management book of the month" period.
About every month they would find a new fad, and we had to adopt it.
The worst one I had was when they decided to follow the idea that in every group the reviews had to follow a normal distribution -- remember we had been through layoff after layoff, so the bottom end of that distribution curve had been chopped away pretty significantly.
I gave my group the reviews they deserved. It was thrown back to me for revision -- I basically had to give someone a "failing" grade - no excuses, throw a dart at a list of names if you have to, but pick one.
So ... I then had to give this bad news to some person who really didn't deserve it.
He was more than a little upset since he had done a good job all year.
Fortunately, he didn't realise that I was more upset than he was!
That job sucked.