Member-only story
How I Survived Nearly 40 Years in Silicon Valley as a Woman in Tech
My story from the ’80s to now
On a rainy night in December 1983, I drove to the mall in Columbia, Maryland. On the way home, the cold rain turned to freezing rain, and the roads became ice rinks. I almost slid off the road multiple times and passed numerous car accidents. Eventually, I decided to park close to a ditch and walk home before I hit a tree or worse. Icicles hung from my hair, and I could barely feel my feet. That was the night I decided to move West.
It wasn’t just the freezing rain, sleet, and snow. Lately, I had begun to get bored with my career developing and maintaining nonprofit accounting and membership packages on an IBM midsize computer. I had been working on the same types of hardware and software systems for years, doing the same kind of programming over and over. I needed more challenges and opportunities to learn and improve my technical skills. I considered moving to one of the tech hubs at the time, but Massachusetts also had awful winters, and North Carolina was too far south of the Mason-Dixon line. Even then, Silicon Valley was one of the most expensive places to live in the country, but the weather was perfect.
I felt fortunate to have chosen a career as a software developer. My high school offered a computer class when almost no…
