I was at the Nuthouse sometime last month with work friends. Amongst them was a recent MIT grad who'd invited all of his local college friends to join us. Once someone had started the ball of introductions rolling, floods of guys came up to introduce themselves to me.

Their message? "You need to go introduce yourself to our friend over there." (Here they'd gesture toward a girl in the opposite corner, hovering over a foosball table.) "She doesn't meet any other females out here in the Bay Area."

I'm lucky to be working at a place and in a role where this isn't really the case. As an interaction designer rather than a straight-up software engineer, I spend half my time dealing with product managers, amongst whom I can't perceive a gender imbalance. Two of my projects have, anomalously, a woman as tech lead. Even in all-male teams, though, I feel like work is work.

Really, it comes down to attitude rather than numbers, and I'm lucky to be working somewhere where most people don't seem very interested in your gender in the context of the workday, and the ones who are interested are the ones trying to arrange your bountiful weeks of both paternity and maternity leave.

But now what?

What should I do? Why should I care? What's the good fight to be fought for women in technology, when really things are pretty darn good in my sheltered little microcosm?

I guess the real remaining problem and opportunity is numbers. Numbers in industry influenced by numbers in secondary education influenced by numbers in high school influenced by somebody well-intentionedly telling an eleven-year-old girl that isn't it great she's so good at algebra when mostly it's boys who are good at algebra. I'm trying to elucidate this more in my head, but it's kind of hard when I'm not confronting it on a daily basis.