But surely you encounter women outside of Great Clips. Maybe there's even one or more living in the same household as you. The context is changed, but the women

But surely you encounter women outside of Great Clips. Maybe there's even one or more living in the same household as you. The context is changed, but the women are still women. Why should the context dictate how sexist someone should be to someone else? (And I say someone rather than 'a woman' because men face the same thing in other industries that women feel in CS/IT.) A reasonable reaction is being surprised/shocked that a man is cutting your hair at Great Clips. That is not discrimination. Unreasonable and discriminatory is to then start to say derogatory things about him and his work in the context of his working in a majority female workplace and then tip him like shit afterwards. It's pretty fair to say the woman in question was encountering some of this at work. My pull-out-of-my-arse statistics: there are lots of men in CS and IT that I've talked to, met in person, drank with, worked with, and even slept with some. Most men I know are really nice and reasonable, and in a good way (read: good friends!). A few of them are awkward, but again, in a good-to-acceptable way (making wrong assumptions or stepping on toes, but learning). But it's the few that I can count on my fingers that I will remember as treating me like complete shit that will be the reason why I'd want to switch careers altogether if I were to work with them regularly. Some of these can be explained away by culture differences, age differences and more. But you know what. When you're sitting in a room with 5 other people and only one is female and she's the developer working on what all six of you met to discuss...and you outright ignore her when she's trying to talk to you...that's sexism, that's bullshit, and no amount of culture clash explains that away. And that and more is what I put up with once in a while, and most of that related to this industry even though programming is maybe half of what I do on a regular basis. I've even got a story about a dev at one office that wasn't even an acquaintance that stared at my tits all day long and tried to grope me. :P Him I'd have to categorize as a general creep more than geeks-gone-stupid though, it doesn't happen often and it was probably just coincidence. Anyway....it may be part of life, but it doesn't mean I have to put up with it more than necessary. It's pretty funny people explicitly mention other fields like bio-anything being women friendly and women heavy...chem and BME are some of my other interests, and I sure don't get that crap there. It's very tempting to go specialize/switch to something where I get less of this discriminatory behavior from others.