Here's how it happens: if a woman engineer starts talking, men will wait until she says something notably clever before they start taking her seriously. Men on

Here's how it happens: if a woman engineer starts talking, men will wait until she says something notably clever before they start taking her seriously. Men on the other hand are taken seriously by default, and only get dismissed if they say something notably dumb. I was neutral to mildly positive on the post until this point. It is simply false. In tech, nobody is taken seriously by default. I certainly never have been, and I'm a young tall skinny white guy with glasses (the very computer-geek stereotype if ever there was one). I have to re-prove myself every time. I've never observed anything different with regard to anyone else. It turns out that there is one way you can get people to take you seriously from the get-go: "earn the respect of your immediate peers" (people take you seriously if it's obvious that everyone else does). I suppose it might appear that this implies that the majority is taken seriously by default, because most of the people who have the respect of their peers will be from that majority by simple averaging. Now, I don't mean to comment on whether or not it's harder for women to "prove themselves". Never having been a woman myself, and not being a neutral observer, it's hard to make that comparison. My only point is that the amount of effort is nonzero for men as well.