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, N.J., 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. Of course, the stereotype says a hacker is a solitary teen-age boy who stays up all night in his bedroom trying to knock the Pentagon's Web site off the Net, and indeed, Milhon said, the image is not altogether false. Also, girls tend to be better at finding human contact. A spokesman for Defcon, the annual hacker gathering in Las Vegas, estimated that the event drew eight men for every woman.