Re:I find that insulting (Score 4, Insightful)

As a woman who has gotten her CS undergraduate degree and currently is a computational scientist (in another scientific field) I'm finding many of these comments patently ridiculous. I can only speak for my own experiences but I do believe them to be indicative of what it means to be woman in CS. In undergrad I fell in love with coding and added a CS major to my degree. I found that I was tolerated but not important. However, I wasn't going to let the fact that no one took me seriously get in the way of my education. I asked all the questions I could, used every resource available to me and ignored that fact that people pretty much helped me out of paternal amusement. No one actually thought I'd do anything useful in the field. I never let on that I got better grades than all of them. I took my skills to another area of science where I'm valued and I still get to use my computer skills. I administer my own set of machines, I write my own code, I design and implement my own projects and I'm expected to contribute and work damn hard (as everyone I work with is expected to, male or female). Let me kill some myths here. It's not that I was one of a few women in CS that was the problem (I'm still in science here, trust me I am pretty much only surrounded by men). It was how I wasn't even important to anyone. I didn't count, no matter how well I did. I wasn't respected. And don't tell me that your 'hormones' kick in when you talk to a woman so you can't listen to what she says. You're an adult. Get over it. And as for this 'glazed' look everyone keeps talking about when you, god forbid, have to talk to someone who doesn't quite know what you know. In my field, it is my responsibility to be able to communicate my ideas effectively regardless of the background of the person in front of me. This ability affects my access to funding, enables me to form productive collaborations and to express the importance of science to the wider social community as a whole. Think about how isolated your life and how narrow it is if you can only communicate with the very few people around you who know exactly what you know. How do you ever get new ideas for your work? All my best ideas come from interactions and exposure to different fields and approaches. Anyway. I've left the field of standard CS and never looked back. My advice to any woman who's struggling in the CS field, Take your skills and run. There are many places where you will be respected and valued, just not in CS.