Extremely late to the party, but I actually didn’t have a medium account til reading this.

To the best of my knowledge, other than the “everyone is” answer, I’m not “on the scale”. That being said, guess what? You aren’t the only one who’s had these experiences, but what I generally find is that with the “I’m persecuted” crowd being so loud, our voices are drowned out, shouted down, and blamed for being part of the problem. I ran linux and web servers in ‘93, went to NANOG 11 in ’97 (one of 5 women to do so) and in general, because I never said “make way for me because I’m female” not once did I ever feel pushed aside. Several times I got the “you don’t know anything”, when I didn’t, and several times I gave it, most frequently to men, since that was what was around. Thanks for saying well, and loudly, the side of the story frequently drowned out during the persecution olympics.

All that being said, I’ve also been a hiring manager for tech positions, several times in the past decade. Nothing shuts down a candidate sooner than trying to bond over percieved similarities instead of answering technical questions. It always amazed me how many women assumed I’d coast them through an interview over the bond of sisterhood when what I wanted was an engineer. I need people who can do their job, not tell me why it’s “the man’s” fault they can’t.