The lines out the door probably should have been an early signal of how successful the #ILookLikeAnEngineer had become — seemingly overnight. Admittedly, I had started one. Commuting over from Oakland, I didn’t trust the BART to be on time, and I had always overcompensated for my inclination toward lateness by arriving no less than fifteen minutes early.

Hundreds of people appeared, with a line snaking its way through the Rackspace headquarters. Over catered quinoa, locally brewed beers, and other delicious treats, it seems like people of a similar mindset had found their way under one roof.

The only way to describe this is amazing.

However, many of the issues discussed last night are so incredibly prevalent that simply discussing them in tech just doesn’t do them justice.

I don’t speak alone when I state that discrimination raises its ugly head in other parts of society. But let’s consider an area that’s honestly not so different from tech — video games.

Yes, she DOES give me code reviews.

This is my dog. Her name is Jaina, and she was named after my favorite video game character, Lady Jaina Proudemoore. I wanted to give her a strong name, and Lady J was an incredible character in Warcraft 3. She’s also my Twitter icon because she is that awesome. (It’s also worth noting that she deals with her own discrimination, because she’s a purebred, working Doberman.) This seems pretty disjointed to be in an article about gaming and tech, but A) I love this dog and so should you, and B) you don’t just name your dog after something that’s not incredibly important to you.

Hi. My name is Kim, and I am both an engineer and a gamer. I’ve had to prove my “gamer cred” almost as often as my “engineer” cred. I play mostly MMOs, in which I have played in top world guilds. I’m currently playing in one of the top ten US guilds for World of Warcraft. I don’t play a healer, but I have in the past. Actually, I prefer playing melee or a tank (I just can’t do casters in general). I also write a column dedicated to my class, write several guides relating to my class, and also interact pretty heavily with the community. In Final Fantasy XIV: Heavensward, I lead a free company (a guild) and a raid, and I am its main tank.

But I’m not a real gamer. Because I don’t look like one, and I don’t play whatever the acceptable game is.

Similarly, I’ve had to prove several times that I can be an engineer. I’m actually extremely passionate about user experience (and honestly, front end in general.) I currently work for a relatively well-known company (which I will not reveal here, so as to not get the PR people mad at me!), which is amazing — my team is incredibly diverse. And it’s the most accepting team I have ever been on. That’s pretty special to me, considering the hurdles I’ve had to endure — hurdles that, in retrospect, aren’t too different from the same crap I deal with in gaming.

Just a month ago, I did a podcast discussing my own class in World of Warcraft. A new tier had just released the week before, and I had only recently joined my guild. Here’s a link. It seems pretty good — Bay and Iryshe are pretty awesome people, and have treated me well. In fact, I’d say that the majority of the community is pretty damn awesome.

my monk looks so angry… She honestly isn’t though!

However, then there’s the behind the scenes. The level 1s that were made on my server to go tell me to “kill a real boss” (keeping in mind — the “real bosses” hadn’t even released yet), the comments to show them my chest, and other things I’ve since tried to block from my mind. Trolling is fine and teasing is fine, and I’d brush it off. Except, I’ve been on this podcast three times now, and these are the kinds of comments showered on me each time.

Gaming and tech are not so wildly different. I, for one, happened to be brought into gaming through tech. At 15, the person who inspired me to learn how to code in C also introduced me to World of Warcraft. I grew up in an incredibly conservative family that barely even allowed me to play Pokemon, much less anything else. I don’t think it’s any secret that gamer culture is cruel, cold, and unaccepting — everything that tech culture can be, except its more open about it because of anonymity and the issues dealt with by several indie developers that happen to be women.

It pains me that so many of my friends are treated horrendously by gamers and are afraid to play non-single player games. It makes me angry that minorities have slurs thrown at them in what should be safe, comfortable environments — whether they are women, or trans, or homosexual, or Asian, or Latino, or whatever. It makes me so angry that we have to have our “gamer cred” and our “engineer cred” questioned just because we don’t look the way that people think we should. In fact, I am embarrassed that a guild known to have game developers from a specific company has this FAQ for their guild (do a quick search for the “fairer sex”) — worse comes the fact that this type of stereotyping remains ubiquitous and simply unspoken in the raiding community.

And I am so happy — so very, incredibly happy — that we are talking about this. We’re talking about this in tech. We’re talking about this in gaming. Women — who were the first programmers, who were game developers before it was a real title and were as common on the Atari as they were in the arcade — are treated like metaphorical black sheep in the fields that we pioneered in. That’s pretty disgusting.

So, to echo the sentiment of last night — now what? Now, we keep the conversation going. We show companies — both in tech and in gaming, considering how close both of these are — that they cannot shut us out. When we’re asked about our gamer cred, we tell them exactly how it is: we have nothing to prove to them. Nothing. We are pretty awesome how we are, whether our main games are Halo, Call of Duty, Hearthstone, or Solitaire. We’re amazing just how we are, whether we’re working more in JavaScript, Ruby, PHP, or CSS.

And now we just need to get out there and talk about it. The only way to change these stereotypes is to show them how false they are.