Today, a facebook friend who's a computer science instructor asked women in CS, "What helped you get through? What didn't?" Here's what I replied in the comments:
The one thing that I know for sure helped me "get through" was my boyfriend during my Intro to CS class at UC Berkeley in 1979. I didn't know anything about computers and the teacher spoke to us as though we'd already taken CS in high school. (I hadn't taken it in high school because I didn't know what it was, only geeky boys took it, and nobody, but nobody, even suggested it to me even though I was very talented in math.) My boyfriend (thanks, Brian Kell) knew about computers and helped me understand the concepts. (He's now an intro CS instructor!) If it weren't for Brian I would have gotten very frustrated and perhaps given up. In the end I got an A+ in the course and added CS as a second major to Biochemistry.
My parents were not college educated, so I did not have them as role models, but that may have been a net positive-- it gave me a lot of freedom from expectation.
I wanted to get a PhD in CS at UW, but I ended up quitting. I feel really disappointed about that, even though I went on to have a satisfying career. What I think I needed and didn't get was gentle but persistently intensive mentoring. Someone who really believed in me and made sure I succeeded. I have a personality that resists mentoring, even by women. I went through three graduate advisors. My perception was that the (all male) faculty was sincerely trying to support me and it never crossed my mind that any of my difficulties had anything to do with my sex. The only memory I have of any kind of sexism was when I organized a Women in CS luncheon and heard complaints from male classmates. I had chosen an interdisciplinary research topic and felt completely on my own regarding how to bring it all together. I put together an inter-departmental committee and consulted regularly with the faculty in the other departments (Biochemistry and Genetics), took summer jobs in my specialty and designed my own internship at UCSF, but in the end felt frustrated and overwhelmed. I blamed my failure on myself for choosing an overly difficult topic that nobody on the faculty cared about, but in the years after I quit, my peculiar interdisciplinary interest became a hot subject (now called bioinformatics or computational biology) that several UW CS faculty now publish in. Kinda makes you go Hmmmmm ...
