Black or Female in Technology Get Unwritten Diversity Quiet Code

Ana Medina says there’s an unwritten code in Silicon Valley. She was introduced to it after her first Google Inc. developer conference, where a guy in her row asked if she’d scored a free ticket because she’s a girl. Someone posted a photo of her from the event and it drew a raft of comments, about her cleavage.

Her instinct was to broadcast her astonishment on Twitter, but friends talked her out of it. “‘It’s not going to be worth it,’” Medina, a 20-year-old computer sciences major, says they told her. “It was a kind of ‘shake it off, let it go’ thing.”