Hi, I was a female engineer many moons ago. I stopped doing CS related for a while but now am back in the industry. Here are my answers: 1. Short answer no. CS

Hi, I was a female engineer many moons ago. I stopped doing CS related for a while but now am back in the industry. Here are my answers: 1. Short answer no. CS industry has grown very fast, faster than the human to catch up. In the early day, lots of companies employee anyone with any tech skills (no matter how little experiences they have) just to keep up with the growth. So in the beginning, someone (usually men) who worked as a field tech (eg. putting cables in someone's home) could land a job in the CS with higher salary. Where women tend to enter CS after they graduated from universities. These men used to work with other men and not used to work with women. So they created a very tough environment for women to enter. I had good experiences with younger co-workers who also graduated from universities. We could talk the same lingo and had civilised discussion. But the older men were harder to work with, they had different work ethics too. For them it was a politic games, not getting the job done. I also find that workers from India are gender bias. There are few Australian companies that have Indian managers or even higher, and there are no female tech engineers in their teams. 2. Based on my experiences, the older ones (in the 90s) were hired because for their gender. The yonger male co-workers who graduated from universities had more opportunities to get better pay, better projects (more interesting and technical), more training. These might answer why Australia is still behind in the tech world. Australia has not capitalized on the other 50% of the population. Australian companies would rather hire someone from overseas (places like India) than an Australian female CS graduate. The foreign workers may be cheaper and could fill the positions faster, but they are not necessarily better at doing the job. I believe Australia's universities have higher quality CS education than India's universities. 3. No, I never felt uncomfortable being the only female. My explanation would be that she came from different culture.