I had hoped things would get better in my lifetime, but they're going backwards in many ways. I'd be incredibly happy if all men just started treating women as people, in the way they treat other men as people.
As a systems hacker, you must be prepared to do savage things, unspeakable things, to kill runaway threads with your bare hands, to write directly to network ports using telnet and an old copy of an RFC that you found in the Vatican.