I hope that gender/race/sexual orientation/anything specific events will fade away eventually. But right now there's still a lot of casual sexism in tech that goes well beyond the well meant joke.

I've worked in the adult industry, gaming and lighter tech(IT) before transitioning to development. Prior to entering the dev job market I wrote off women who complained about the tech industry as whiny or overly sensitive. On one of my very first interviews the CEO told me women aren't math minded so he was going to skip some of the questions for me. On another interview I was asked why "he should take on the liability of hiring a female programmer".

To be honest I personally could not care less about the sexual aspect of it, getting hit on, ect., as that stuff can and does happen anywhere. But I've never ever had people question my intelligence because of my gender until I got involved in development. (Or at least not bold enough to voice it to my face in a professional setting.) At first I was even against the idea of female only learn to program classes until I started volunteering at several LTC type events and saw the difference in how comfortable women are. It's not even about sex in 99.9% of cases, which is where a lot of people take it. This comic gets brought a lot to demonstrate what I'm describing and it's really spot on: http://xkcd.com/385/.

I think everyone can agree that we would like to get to the point where attribute specific outreach programs are not needed but until we get there they are a good resource.

This wasn't part of your question but I'm sure it was brought up somewhere in the thread: Obvious sexism is not long dead. I'm only 30 and when I was in school men had to take shop and women had to take home ec. I was actively discouraged from college as it was viewed as a waste of money because women would only spend a few years working before becoming moms (if they finished school at all).

>On one of my very first interviews the CEO told me women aren't math minded so he was going to >skip some of the questions for me. On another interview I was asked why "he should take on the >liability of hiring a female programmer".

Those are a couple of pretty shitty interviews to be sure. I'm curious how many interview you've had for dev positions and if they're all bad like that with these being the worst examples, or if they're the only good examples.

What I'm trying to get at is that if it was 2/10 interviews were horrible like this then that's regrettable but not indicative of highly institutionalized sexism. If it's more like 8/10 interviews then I would think it is. Obviously we can't draw any rigorous conclusions from a single person's experience but I'm curious nonetheless.

Part of the reason I'm even asking is because I don't see a lot of sexism in the tech circles I travel in, but I also don't go anywhere near "brogrammer" type gatherings either. Based on the absence of sexism I see on a regular basis I'd like to believe the best in people in general.

I should have made it clear that it's is certainly not the majority. My very first interviews were the bad ones and I was referred to the "skipping math questions" guy by a close friend. There was some other minor shit but I felt like it was caused more by awkwardness than sexism. After my troubles I started heavily screening companies I accepted interviews at. So this was 2/8 in person interviews but that's very high because of my pickiness. I probably did 20 or so phone interviews and either chose not to take it further or wasn't invited to continue.

I also run a very large meetup group (around 4000 people) that is nearly 100% tech workers. In four years and hundreds of meetups I've only met a handful of guys that have issues with women in tech. But like I've said, the ones that really believe there's something different about women that make them not care about hard work/intellectual pursuits/math/whatever are just so hateful that they stick with you.

I ended up joining two wonderful companies that were totally accepting and I felt 100% comfortable around everyone at all times. I got a contract to hire gig at Scripted but before the hire date I got an offer from ThoughtWorks from an earlier interview. I can't even describe how wonderful they both are.

I think that it's an ugly cycle right now. It's hard for me to talk about the experiences I've had because without adding a ton of qualifiers it can sound like I am blaming more than those few specific people. Which obviously puts people on the defensive which only leads to worse situations.

I'm jet lagged and rambling, hope this gives you a little more insight.

Perhaps, but people who are similar in some way (in this case, gender and profession) will always want to meet in a specialized way. Conferences are already specialized (CSS conferences, JS conferences, conferences for health startups, conferences for email marketing...)

Like it or not, being a female founder is way harder than being a male founder. Raising money is so much harder since you don't fit the Mark Zuckerburg stereotype. A friend of mine hid her pregnancy while raising money because she didn't want to be asked whether she was committed or not - would a guy with a pregnant wife be asked the same?

So yes, personally — I am very excited about this conference and meeting other female founders and talking to them about their experiences. Finding other people like me. Definitely comfortable with these kind of conferences being a part of society because I find a lot of women don't want to start a company since it's even harder than being a dude, and I want that to change.

I don't like them and hope they go away as quickly as possible. I dislike segregation on principle, generally speaking.