I don’t even know this guy, and *I* am fantasizing about going back in time and punching him in the face.

What about:

The “M” is for “mathematics,” idiot.

I have a great tip for sorting out the accidental assholes from the true assholes. It was the only HR directed training that I have found consistently helpful in my career. When someone says something to you that can be taken two ways and you aren’t sure what they meant, you say “Ouch!” Someone who meant it the nice…

Sadly, these statements are relatively low-key in tech. Things that have been said to/about me: “you mean you hired one of those girls out there?” “You were hired for your tits,” “we were afraid to hire another woman after our last one didn’t work out” and my personal favorite “you’re a belligerent woman and we fire…

He doesn’t seem to know that the M is for Math. The chicks have obviously addled his brains with all their thinky-talky female folderol.

My wife, who started writing code back in the 80s, is blonde and let’s say, well proportioned. She likes to dress nicely and back then, she wore a skirt or dress every single day. She’d show up for work and initially she’d get some of those kind of comments from her peers. I know because she’d come home and talk about…

As a woman in astrophysics, I get this kind of harassment quite a bit. It's rather frustrating, and it can be incredibly demoralizing. I'm working on developing a thicker skin, but the surprise of male colleagues when I accomplish something still stings. The behavior of older male professors is pretty abhorrent as…

I do like like LIKE *MUCH LIKE* it when I run into a geek/coder who happens to be a woman. Even a woman who’s just generally interested in tech, is a refresher. When they show up at some tweak blog as Lh e.g., the color comes back into the whole field, whereas before..... well just imagine a vast crowd of people who…

Yes, I've had things like that too. The strangest I got was speaking to a dev about an error in his code and he started to tell me that he could see it was a very "emotional" thing with me - and I was actually rather stone cold and un-emotional. I said no it isn't and then he said he could see I was abut to "cry" -…

I was born with a lady-body but I identify as genderqueer.

I actually conduct clinics at colleges about how to deal with exactly this kind of issue. Let me know if I can be of assistance if you want to pick it back up! I’ll tell you this though, it never gets better, no matter how good you are. You just get better at dealing with it. Having a network of women helps, having…

“We need to be more polite” “Women are fickle, moody, and easily slighted, can’t take a joke, and are basically ruining everything because they’re tired of being treated poorly in STEM fields.”

You always need a snappy comeback in those situations. “Wow, for someone with such a small head, you sure have a big brain!” or the like. It works so much better than punching them in the face.

This is a huge problem in my field too. I’m feminine, so people assume I’m incompetent! I’ve had substitute musicians who are playing in my band offering to explain to me how to play a part that was WRITTEN FOR ME before they ever heard me play. Their assumption? I was a college student and I needed their (first time…

Treating women as rare animals that you don’t know how to talk to is the start of the problem, really. Some guys are just a-holes who don’t realize that women can be just as competent at their field or even better at it than them, but some guys treat women as unknowable aliens, or as separate monolithic creatures, &…

A good friend has been a programmer for many years. Both before her transition from male to female, and after.

“How did you learn to do all this?!”

There’s nothing wrong with the first and third statements if: a) the request/intent is genuine; b) you don’t say it to only women. When it comes to condescension, you absolutely *MUST* be equal-opportunity!

In my last job, we had hired an outside company to redo our network wiring and install a new firewall/VPN device. I asked the project manager to give me the administrative login and show me the settings and he said, “Sure. If you can understand it, I guess anyone can.” With a grin.