As a woman who also started out as an SE - well done Kyoko! It's often a struggle in ways you don't expect. For example, one day I visited a customer with a male account manager. The customer kept asking the account manager the technical questions. He would say "I don't know, Tina - what do you think?". The customer spent the entire meeting just not figuring out that I was the technical person! The AM and I had a good laugh about it afterwards - which is often the only reaction you can have.