(TL;DR: I scolded a female employee who caused a serious problem and was told I should have treated her differently because she's a woman having a hard time in a male industry)

This happened in the late 90s but it is still in my mind because I feel like it was a lose - lose situation.

It was in North America, at a large tech company at the top of its field. Large offices, thousands of employees, etc. I was in a lead position back then with coding and management.

The team was maybe 50-60 people, very male dominated (maybe around 90%).

I've a very direct style of dialog and until this day, I always tell people that I don't care if they make a mistake, I'm just interested in how we're going to fix it. At the same time negligence has always been a pet peeve of mine. Since we built products that, back in those days, couldn't be updated, being very rigorous was very important.

One day we had a series of problems and had to figure out what happened. As data was processed in a pipeline manner, the key was to find at which steps things got wrong. The data was highly numerical so not something you can observe and tell if it's wrong or not. Everyone had to run some tests on their own to try to identify if their part was responsible or not but nothing came out of it.

I called a meeting and we started to discuss it, trying to bounce ideas at each other, etc. Until it all pointed to one programmer that confessed after a little bit of pressure that she didn't run tests on her side because she "knew" the problem couldn't have been on her end. As the discussion progressed it turned out that she also hadn't run her own normal regular tests either and was under the assumption that if something failed it couldn't be her. I berated her about it and explained how this wasted time from everyone in the room. Afterwards, she went on to find she had caused the problem and eventually fixed it.

Fast forward a couple days later, a few of us were out and one of the female employees, that I was friend with, took me apart for a chat and told me: "you shouldn't have done that to her, you have no idea how difficult it is to be a woman in this industry". To which I replied that I always treated her the same way as everyone else and we went in circles.

So, my question ends up being: how should have this been handled?

• On one end, treating her like everyone else brings me some light scolding since I should have been sensitive that it's hard to be a woman in that team while
• On the other end if I had treated her differently because she's a woman, I believe it would have set a wrong precedent and possibly demean her in the team as well.

Due to how the situation unfolded and everyone wanting to know the guilty party on the spot, there wasn't really an opportunity to take that discussion offline. I don't think it crossed my mind at the time either since we were all in the heat of the moment after a week of long hours and frustrations.

Every now and then, when we discuss work situations this one comes to my mind but I never made peace with it.

Edit:

With 20+ more years of experience, I know that public criticism wasn't the right way to do this and it should have been taken into a private discussion. At 50, I hopefully learned a great deal more about people than I used to know back then (I believe I was 26-27 when it happened).

But the question hinges on the Male vs. Female issue since the criticism was in essence that it was harder on her, as a Woman, than if I had issued the same criticism to a Man.

For this reason, I can't accept as answer the otherwise valid points that suggest this should have been handled in another manner since they do not address the core question.