This story is from Wired:

It was not the first time Dana DeBeauvoir had moved a room full of men. At 9 o’clock in the morning on August 8, 2011, she adjusted a pair of half-frame reading glasses on the end of her nose, got up behind a tabletop podium in a downtown San Francisco hotel, and set out to enlist some of her most bitter adversaries in a dare. “I really appreciate the opportunity to visit with you today,” she began in a warm tone of Southern geniality, flashing a wide, radiant smile.

DeBeauvoir (pronounced day-buv-WAH) introduced herself as the chief clerk and election administrator of Travis County, Texas, better known as the home of Austin. She was dressed in a dark tailored jacket and ruffled blouse, with nails polished in her favorite candy-apple red. Gazing back at her was an audience of academics, computer scientists, and hacktivists, whose collective occupation was warning the American people that the country’s election technology was dangerously vulnerable. Most of them slouched around banquet tables in the programmer’s uniform of mussed hair, rounded paunches, and untucked shirts. They were assembled for one of the nation’s preeminent conferences on election technology, and DeBeauvoir—who had a fairly average grasp of computers—was the event’s unlikely keynote speaker.

Trying to break the ice, she stammered through a yuk-yuk computer joke that strung together references to Python and CherryPy 3.2.0. It was greeted with scattered snickers. Then she cut the air by acknowledging what everyone already knew: “There’s some unpleasantness here.”

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