>Because I've been a travelling independent, I've been able to see a number of environments and have witnessed all sorts of sexism - some blatant and some subtle. I've been on interview teams, even as a contractor, where I heard some of the most incredible rationalizations not to hire women.
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>Up until around 2 and 1/2 years ago, I was a consultant. I was hired in the telephone interview for the last 2 assignments I took before becoming full time permanent staff. While I was in these assignments (they were .NET contracts, not VFP), I was a rock star. So my experience has been a little different than yours. The only conference that I have been to since 2008 was SWFox last year and you are right about the conference attendance. Even at SWFox it was still predominantly male but I think that there were proportionately more women then there were at Devcon 1996...

For whatever reasons, the Fox community has always been an outlier. I was lucky also that my graduate department was an outlier: 4 women on a faculty of 15, lots of female grads and undergrads. OTOH, I was part of a working group on User Interface Management Systems that had faculty and PhD students from a number of different schools and I was the only woman (IIRC).

Tamar