[jacalata]

It sounds like you are so defensive that you're not willing to recognise that any problems could be because of their gender, which is just as likely to be wrong as the people who insist that all problems are because of gender. How do you know that she wasn't a perfectly capable lead with team members who didn't take her seriously because she was female? Do you literally believe that's an impossible scenario?

From the article, while I can't judge her abilities as a lead, at least part of her problems were to do with feeling like she was being treated differently because she was a woman and having no way to verify this. If she was one of a number of women, then it would be much easier for her to check on that feeling and see if it was true. When you are the only one of your kind, you can't look for people with similar backgrounds to look for correlations, so you can't really tell if there is a pattern or not. If I thought that it was completely unrealistic and impossible for any developers to be sexist, then I might write this story off as entirely her own neuroses - but I am not convinced that is the case.

(also, given the numerous comments along the lines of 'you don't like assholes well get out of tech then', I suspect she would have hit pushback no matter how she phrased any stories of struggles with dealing with assholes)