Also to add to the Asian part (Chinese in particular in my case), CS is still too new to be a particularly esteemed profession in Chinese culture, and I don't t

Also to add to the Asian part (Chinese in particular in my case), CS is still too new to be a particularly esteemed profession in Chinese culture, and I don't think I'm alone in having parents and a large extended family that pressured me hard to pursue a conservative, high income, esteemed profession instead such as medicine, finance, accounting, or law. Having graduated right after the dotcom bubble crashed certainly didn't help either, and was pretty close to taking a first job in accounting, as my parents convinced me that tech was dead-end. I finally put my foot down after realizing I would have been miserable doing anything other than tech, and it took quite a lot of time and effort before my parents accepted my career choice. However, there's absolutely no doubt in my mind that I would have ended up in tech sooner or later no matter what happened. I'm not saying that having pushy Asian parents is the same as having to face gender discrimination, but simply that CS is not simply handed on a silver platter to all men either.