These women in IT horror stories strike me as a “Men Mars - Women Venus” thing, where the women want to share experiences and have someone to commiserate with and some men do the right thing and share and others like myself go into problem-solving mode which is the wrong thing to do according to the theory. Then it occurred to me that information technology really is Mars, the logical machine driven by pure mathematical principles, a refuge of pure intellect. There are plenty of freakin’ awesome women engineers and scientists ( Fei Fei Li is one who impresses the hell out of me http://vision.stanford.edu/feifeili/ ) thriving in this Martian atmosphere, just as some men do in those Venereal realms (the proper adjective of Venus, ‘Venutian’ is contrived) like nursing and elementary education. It’s possible that terraforming Mars-like IT into a more Venus-compatible environment will be a big challenge.