I’m so sorry you had that experience, Clémentine. That’s horrible, and quite unacceptable.
It’s a tragedy that, in over thirty years’ professional development and business experience, I’ve not had the honour to work alongside all that many women coders. Sadly, British schools have only recently woken up to the idea of equal opportunities: to abolish implicit gender links to certain academic subjects; to encourage young women into engineering disciplines; to push back against school-kids who stigmatise female colleagues who want to take an engineering route. We’re fixing that, step by step, kid by kid.
For those women who have made it into paid work, within the technical areas I’ve worked the environment is much more supportive and inclusive than you’ve experienced. Maybe it’s a British thing. The very many male software engineers with whom I’ve worked been more libertarian and less macho than the ones you describe — I don’t think I’ve ever seen behaviour like that — and in general the only thing we don’t tend to tolerate is intolerance.
For what it’s worth, you would be very welcome to come work for or with me if there was an opportunity to do so*.
I truly hope your next workplaces are better.
(* I’d be more than happy to come to work for/with you too — but I’ve done the working-away-from-home thing, and learnt it’s not great for my kids to be apart from their Dad during the week. I’d only consider it now for stellar contract rates.)
