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.<p>Hell, I almost incited a screaming match at my last job because one of my coworkers, who is a proud Republican, wouldn&#x27;t shut up about politics and his only criticism of Hillary Clinton wasn&#x27;t that her opinions would have negative consequences or her logic was poor, but because &quot;she&#x27;s got kankles&quot;. The only reason it didn&#x27;t escalate is because he ignored me. It still pisses me off to even recall how stupid this was.<p>Maybe I&#x27;ve been fortunate enough to know plenty of great people throughout the years, <i>not all of whom were men</i>, that exuded technical knowledge and practical wisdom.<p>How many infosec folks can, in the subject of cryptography, hold a candle to Dr. Tanja Lange?<p>How many PHP programmers can hope to even <i>approximate</i> the Herculean efforts of Andrea Faulds to make PHP 7 something great?<p>We didn&#x27;t get to where we are today, in terms of technological progress, because sexist ideas or behaviors have any merit.