I agree, I have always worked in a male environment, (Engineering and IT Support), I worked with mostly men. I found when I worked in the school as IT support, where over the years we had a various male IT staff in our small office, (there would be 3/4 of us at any time in our office). We supported 300 male/female staff and about 1000 students each year. Most male and some female staff assumed I was an admin, and that I did not know anything about IT Support, so when they walk into our office if the men were in the office they would speak to them first as they assume that I would not know the answer. Yet, I would be sent around the school fixing computer issues on a daily basis. I was also school photographer, website designer and did the school prospectus and other documentation needed by the school, to a good standard.
One occasion our IT Teacher was teaching website design to his students for the first time and he had a question, he asked the men in the office, but they did not know the answer, I pipped up that I knew the answer, (being website designer why was I not asked first?) Being a female in the office they assumed I would not know all these answers, or that I would not know where to find the answers if needed. I was there nearly 20 years!! Each of us had our areas of expertise, you can't know everything about IT, but we knew enough to work out solutions to the majority of the problems or could work out a solution to fix it. We each had our own set of skills, so it worked well. There were very rarely problems that we could not sort between us. It was similar in previous jobs I had because I was always a woman in a male environment.
