I can easily imagine that my career was influenced by my location/gender/race/sexual orientation, but my "hacker skills", for better or worse, were gained in so

I can easily imagine that my career was influenced by my location/gender/race/sexual orientation, but my "hacker skills", for better or worse, were gained in solitude. There would have be no direct social repercussions for girls my age to do as I did, because in reality nobody ever needed to know. It was something even I kept hidden until I started to become confident in what I was doing, and additionally, wasn't really exposed to anyone else like me until many years later. All of these discussions seem to centre around the idea of women being discriminated in hacker groups. I won't dispute it happens, but that seems orthogonal to learning the skills in the first place. Maybe it is just my privilege talking, but it is really difficult to imagine social pressures applying so strongly when alone where secrets can be kept. Having to keep those secrets is a travesty in and of itself, but quite different to what you were speaking to.