I knew exactly how she felt

I wish it was that simple and this was already solved, but even in the Bay Area it can be frustratingly hard to connect with people who come from similar perspectives. I was just at a women in tech event last night and three of us went off for sushi afterward and we all talked about how frustrating it can be to find people who feel like us and how nice it would be if it wasn't so difficult.

I think the starkest variant of this I've seen was when one woman asked another: "Why should we even bother trying to increase the number of women in tech? Sometimes it's not even a good field, why should we be working so hard to get women into it?"

The other woman's response was simple and to the point: "I do it because it'd be nice to have someone to go to lunch with."

The truth of that statement isn't so much in that she couldn't have found anyone to go to lunch with ever, but the relative truth that exists when you feel less comfortable in a group because you're the one who is so different. For many people, tech is a place where everyone is different and different is cool and great. For women, different is often still just different.

She sounds very cool.

And it goes to show that "sexism is the barrier" is not the whole story.

Those girls in the school never had any encounters with such sexism in the tech workplace, but they still didn't like the thing even as a hobby.

Which reminds me of my university years (computer science). Those days (early to mid-nineties) we didn't even have internet at home or any outlet to know how a "tech workplace" even is. We expected to work in some bank, some big company IT department or teach CS ourselves. How that work environment would be, we had absolutely no idea.

Still, it was mostly men that preferred CompSci, whereas biology was mostly women. Math and applied math also had more women.

(In actual university CS nobody cared if you were a woman or a man. And we had the outmost respect for geek girls that were in the whole thing. There was just no sexism of the kind people complain about in the US. If you could do it, you could do it. And high school kids enrolling to the university had no idea either -- they were the typical high school kids, having typical high school relations).

That said, it was mostly boys who cared and nagged their parents to get them computer systems and game consoles. Girls, being more socially mature earlier, had a larger social life and could not care less about spending hours every day in front of a screen.

It's like girls give up the "dolls" phase much earlier, for a more serious and balanced social life, whereas boys extend the "toy guns/race cars" thing into puberty and early adulthood even, substituting their toys for FPS shooters, fantasy novels, superhero comics and RPGs. Which builds some ties to computers early on...

To the point that you get references to said things all the time in programming circles.

I'm sure you are aware of all this, but still wanted to make your point. But the fact that you have some outlier experience ("engineer who never watched Star Wars") should not come into the way of you researching the matter. It's as if I, as a fat person, say "who are those all those fat people with diabetes? I'm fat and I don't have diabetes".

Saying 'a solution to feeling marginalized is to move to a place where you are not marginalized' doesn't really make sense when you aren't applying it to a single individual.

The discourse of modern day feminism is best characterized by writers like Michel Foucault. Where discourse is viewed as a postmodern power play. Where the logical validity of the discourse is secondary to the function it serves in power relations.