Navigating Conferences as an Unusual Attendee | USENIX
www.usenix.org/blog/navigating-conferences-unusual-attendee
From the page
Saved with the link. Notes from 2007 to 2016 are mostly the page's own words, so this is probably an excerpt.
The things that bothered me the most were the questions or statements implying that I didn’t belong at these sorts of events. “Are you here with someone?” Or, “You don’t look like an engineer/sysadmin/whatever.” People pointing out my uniqueness didn’t make me feel any more comfortable. One time I had someone say to me, “Wow, you’re a girl in the data center,” as if I had failed to notice both my gender and the rows of server cabinets around me - not a great way to try and strike up a conversation. While that wasn’t at a meetup, these kinds of comments can be heard anywhere in the industry, and they’re just as off-putting at a conference as they are in a data center.