>Unfortunately, in some parts of the tech community, it's not just a few bad apples, but very bad culture. IME, the VFP community is pretty amazing in the treatment of women as equal partners. I'm sure that's partly because there have been visible female leaders in the community pretty much from day 1. When I read about some of what women in other tech communities go through on a regular basis, I'm very grateful that I landed in this community.
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Yes, especially in the early years of Fox and then VFP, there were individuals such as yourself, Lisa Slater, Melissa Dunn, Pat Adams, Savannah Brentnall, Cathy Pountney, Marcia, Della Martin, and I'm sure I'm missing many others.

But in comparing the VFP community with tech communities today, remember that the heyday of the VFP community didn't have Twitter and other social media sites. So not as much of the proverbial "sunshine". Last year at a conference, a speaker accidently displayed an inappropriate JPG file on the projector - and in less than an hour, it was known on Twitter with a hashtag and a reference to the speaker. Well, I know of a situation that happened in the 1990's at a Fox show - back in those days, "going viral" meant someone had a fever of 102.

Was the VFP community truly better at treatment of women? I think that's probably subjective and "eye of the beholder" area. I'm not disputing anything you say, I just think the methods of evaluating are different.

My own two cents, the SQL Server, NET, and SharePoint communities are pretty respectable. Those areas have women leaders as well. There are skirmishes and bickering from time to time and that is going to be true of even the most harmonious of software communities. I can't speak for all aspects of those communities but I have not seen anything amounting to a bad culture.

Obviously I don't interact outside the Microsoft realm. I don't know if it's a coincidence but the incidents I know about are non-Microsoft or platform-independent.