Most of her work with the company was, not surprisingly, alongside men. I wasn't treated any differently for it, though. But women with longer tenure in technology say that for better or worse, it is still hard to avoid being a curiosity. I'm in technology because I happen to like it. I'm not trying to make a statement and I don't want to be treated differently.
Technology is about facts and has nothing to do with gender.
Fennelly is a partner in the Wizard's Keys Corp, a computer-security consulting firm in Tinton Falls, New Jersey, that she founded with her husband in 1992. Jude Milhon is a longtime programmer who taught herself the Fortran computer language from a library book in the 1960s. Although she was told to fetch the coffee for a room full of men at her first professional programming job, but spilled it so deftly on the table that her boss wisely opted to have somebody else bring it for future meetings, Milhon went on to work as a programmer and was an editor at Mondo 2000, a cyberculture magazine published in the early 1990s. A spokesman for Defcon, the annual hacker gathering in Las Vegas, estimated that the event drew eight men for every woman. An Australian hacker in her early 30s who goes by the online handle Blueberry has similar memories of her early days on Internet Relay Channel chat areas, which she compares to a men's smoking room.