[sarciszewski]

I always feel weird when I read (especially the comments on) stories like this. Hearing folks who assume that, if a woman is at a technical event, she is either incompetent, only there for the sake of her husband, or both, open their mouths is irritating enough to witness as an outsider; I can hardly imagine how annoying it must be to be the recipient of such baseless disrespect.

Hell, I almost incited a screaming match at my last job because one of my coworkers, who is a proud Republican, wouldn't shut up about politics and his only criticism of Hillary Clinton wasn't that her opinions would have negative consequences or her logic was poor, but because "she's got kankles". The only reason it didn't escalate is because he ignored me. It still pisses me off to even recall how stupid this was.

Maybe I've been fortunate enough to know plenty of great people throughout the years, not all of whom were men, that exuded technical knowledge and practical wisdom.

How many infosec folks can, in the subject of cryptography, hold a candle to Dr. Tanja Lange?

How many PHP programmers can hope to even approximate the Herculean efforts of Andrea Faulds to make PHP 7 something great?

We didn't get to where we are today, in terms of technological progress, because sexist ideas or behaviors have any merit.