In college, Washington State Sen. Patty Kuderer decided to take a programming class.

She said she was excited about technology and created a simple program for the course, which she tried to print and hand in to her professor. But there was a problem: Her program had a flaw in it that caused it to loop endlessly, which meant the printer spit out page after wasted page of code. Kuderer said she asked for help from  others in the college’s computer science lab, who were all men, but no one would help her. One man, she recalled, finally turned to her and said: “You don’t belong here.”