Though GoDaddy still has work to do, the company is “evidence that things can change,” said Lori Mackenzie, executive director of the Clayman Institute for Gender Research at Stanford, which has worked with the firm. “Oftentimes, what keeps companies from shifting is believing the existing system is already fair. Blake is really committed to undermining that.”

When Mr. Irving joined GoDaddy in 2013, the firm was succeeding by selling a commodity — website registration and hosting — through outrageous, scandalous ads, such as a 2005 Super Bowl commercial where a woman’s top kept coming undone while observers discussed her plastic surgery. Those ads were deliberately designed to attract attention through controversy. Today, GoDaddy is worth over $7 billion.

The offensive advertising, however, was demoralizing to GoDaddy’s staff, employees from that period say, and the salaciousness, at times, spilled into the workplace. Staff members describe a hard-charging culture where people drank in the office and participated in and gossiped about interoffice affairs. There was a sexual harassment lawsuit in 2009, later dismissed, and websites like NoDaddy.com, where employees described misbehavior.

Upon becoming chief executive, Mr. Irving immediately decreed that GoDaddy would no longer run sexist ads, and reiterated the company’s commitment to combating workplace discrimination. In part, this was good business: Many of the nation’s small-business owners — the customers GoDaddy hoped to attract — are female. Mr. Irving, who had previously been a high-ranking executive at Microsoft and Yahoo, also felt GoDaddy was failing to attract talented engineers and executives — including women and minorities — who were alienated by the firm’s image.

But to genuinely transform GoDaddy, executives decided, they needed to convince the company’s 3,500 employees, most of whom thought of themselves as fair and good people, that even a seemingly impartial workplace can be discriminatory.

“We needed to become the most inclusive company in tech,” said Mr. Irving. “We had to erase the idea that meritocracy is enough.”