THE TECH WORLD'S PROBLEMS WITH GENDER:

AND MORE:

For one thing, her goals have changed substantially. After high school, "all I wanted to do was have my own apartment."

"I had no intention of going to college," she said. However, a visit, with a friend, to the University of New Orleans, convinced her otherwise. An innate comfort with computers - "I had once sat down and programmed a little guy to run across my TV screen, in BASIC" - saw her join the computer science department there.

Self-doubt and overeager self-criticism, Farmer said, can be crippling to women in the tech industry, where they are almost always in the minority. And she encountered plenty of it herself during her college years. By the time her first class had winnowed itself from 60 students down to just 20 by the time of the final, she was the only woman left.