Congratulations on your 15 minutes, even if you didn’t want it.

I’m sad to hear that this is how your exposure is being received and even more unhappy to hear about the inappropriate nature of some of your colleagues. I wish that more males in tech had the exposure to realize that women are people too, and treat them the way they would treat any other colleague (with respect, openness, and equality), but it seems like a serious problem. Maybe something to think about with ILLAE? We’re not all white middle class dorks with pocket protectors either, and that vision of ourselves is self limiting and self destructive, but I realize that providing support for women in the tech industry is at this time a “lower fruit” and probably a more important short term goal than trying to fix the overall problem (and that the problem won’t be solved if we can’t even integrate women into technical teams without the sort of immaturity and unprofessional-ism you mentioned above).

Mostly I guess I wanted to say, thank you for speaking up, thank you for bearing the burden necessary to make Tech and working in Tech better for everyone, eventually. We’re rooting for your success, keep the hits coming.