Honestly, your story sounds like a typical corporate power struggle which happened to affect a department which was (by some fluke) full of women.
If you read about HP under Fiorina, you hear a similar story. Techies were pushed aside and replaced by Fiorina's cronies (mostly marketers), and the company suffered horribly. Such stories don't always end in disaster - a certain investment bank recently brought on a new IT chief who is well known for destroying a broken department and rebuilding a highly efficient one in it's place.
The process also involves firing many managers and replacing them with people loyal to him, pushing out lots of insiders, huge numbers of formerly comfortable people quitting in disgust, etc.
The only unusual element in your story ("her staff placed under new male supervisors") sounds like reversion to the mean - as you noted, "in another technical department there were none [women]". Perhaps there are other elements to the story that you haven't mentioned, but your description just sounds like normal corporate politics.
You bring up a fantastic point and it's certainly gave us things to think about while it was all happening. I have seen that kind of thing happen in my own career, but it's usually men replacing men with different men -- usually to disastrous effect.
I think what finally made us conclude the sexist element was the speed with which it happened, and that red flags were raised with HR that only seemed to speed things up -- get rid of the complainers faster than they can complain.
If you read about HP under Fiorina, you hear a similar story. Techies were pushed aside and replaced by Fiorina's cronies (mostly marketers), and the company suffered horribly. Such stories don't always end in disaster - a certain investment bank recently brought on a new IT chief who is well known for destroying a broken department and rebuilding a highly efficient one in it's place.
The process also involves firing many managers and replacing them with people loyal to him, pushing out lots of insiders, huge numbers of formerly comfortable people quitting in disgust, etc.
The only unusual element in your story ("her staff placed under new male supervisors") sounds like reversion to the mean - as you noted, "in another technical department there were none [women]". Perhaps there are other elements to the story that you haven't mentioned, but your description just sounds like normal corporate politics.