I worked in helpdesks for just shy of a decade, from office junior in a dev shop, to level 1 in a dialup ISP, then through pretty much every available tech role up to microsoft tech lead at for a top 5 in the world hosting company and senior tech escalation for a top 5 in the world domain registrar. I've been working as an IT contractor in enterprise (government, large industrial, large corporate) environments for the last 5 years.

I've personally seen

- a boss with a policy to only hire ugly or fat girls, because pretty girls distract the geeks

- a level 2 engineer passed over multiple times for promotions, because she wouldn't say fuck in the presence of three or more members of the senior engineers group

- a systems engineer bumped to team lead, then project lead, then solutions architect, generally held to be the best boss anyone in her group had every worked for and one of the highest delivering tech leadership resources in the company, quit and start a business outside of IT when guys who were consistently performing below her metrics in other teams were getting better bonuses and better base salaries, and she was being told that there wasn't money to go around for her.

- an enterprise architect come back from maternity leave (10 months) where she had been effectively part timing (10 to 30 hours a week) because the incompetent guy who'd taken over from her was hopeless and kept calling her for help, who was told that because she'd been out of the current technology scope for so long she'd have to go back to the help desk for 6 months to come up to speed and she'd then be eligible to apply for a promotion, if she did a good job. The incompetent guy who'd been badgering her for her time through her maternity leave was made permanent in her old job.

- Company christmas parties organized behind the girl's backs - so that they could be held at a strip club, while the girls got stuck holding the fort while everyone else got paid to go to the pub.

The christmas party incident, the three girls who got stuck in the office were told to their face that it was a random selection and they just happened to come up. Three girls in a pool of 40 resources, and they happened to all come up? For a party that they hadn't been told about, at a strip club?

I worked with a girl once who probably wasn't as talented/knowledgable as most of the guys in the tech pool. But she was by far the hardest worker. Absolutely crushed our ticket system metrics consistently. But could never get a promotion. At first it was just air excuses 'oh, Dave just deserved it this time.' and things that were maybe plausible. Then they got thin - guys with less experience who weren't very good and way under performing compared to her getting promotions? They just did better in the interview. She started to get pissed about it - as she was passed over for about a dozen different promotions opportunities when the majority of her peers in the tech pool agreed that she should have had the promotion - she worked her ass off. Then she got a reputation for being hard to work with and a complainer - because she had the temerity to be pissed about the blatant discrimination. Any guy who had to put up with that crap would have been just as hard to work with.

My experience has certainly been that competent girls get fucked over in IT. And yeah, everyone in IT will be on the shitty end of a bad management decision if you hang around long enough. But almost every IT job I've had, and every competent girl I've worked with has had a laundry list of bullshit like that.

When your job is diagnostic investigation and repair - you learn to start looking for linking factors and commonalities. You get good at root analysis. It's not hard for anyone who isn't an asshole to see that the crap women go through in enterprise IT, almost certainly has something to do with their gender.