[tanglisha]

I've experienced something similar to what you describe.

There are times when I am new to a group, that I will be constantly told how very valuable to the group I am, how awesome I am, how happy they are to have me, etc; often before I've been in the office for an hour or written a line of code.

After this sort of thing, I tend to be suspicious of praise from that group of people. Do they actually mean it? Did they even look at my code?

[Mz]

I have written a few blog posts about that sort of social dynamic. Some of them have gotten a tiny amount of attention on hn. I also had some interesting experiences in GIS school, which was 70% male. My male teachers seemed to have a little trouble with a woman being the strongest math person in the class. In one case, the professor asked me so often "how do you know that?" that a male student blurted in exasperation "she's obviously already worked it out in her head!" In another case, different professor, he bet me "lunch" that he was right and I was wrong. When he had to pay up, he thanked me for not letting him confuse the class. (He quietly gave me a twenty. I think he didn't want to eat lunch with a female student for fear it would look like a date.)