Hi Elizabeth, just came across this by accident. Sorry to hear you had such a negative experience, I’m afraid it is all too common, and I do believe gender has a lot to do with it. I hope groups like RailsGirls and PyLadies can improve gender inequality in tech, but there is a long way to go.

I was genuinely shocked by how the startup weekend was handled but I had so much respect for the way you stood up for yourself, and it was a pleasure working with you. I don’t have any ready answers for how to deal with discrimination, but I would want to encourage you to have faith in yourself. If I’m honest, at the time I thought the idea was technically trivial and could never turn into a business. But here you are having turned it into a business, and the tech and the men that worked on it ultimately contributed relatively little.