But that wasn't the example referenced. The example referenced about doing a talk on coding topics (data structures, algorithms, code) for an hour and having some ask about my "prior" role as a recruiter.
I went to your homepage, and "programmer" is just a small piece of the subtitle. I look at your first 6 panels, 4 of which (the leftmost 4) are about recruiter/interview stuff, 1 is programming, and 1 is "other". I scroll down to your blog and books, and everything on the homepage is about recruiting or interviewing.
If the vast majority of your homepage is recruiting, it's hardly unreasonable to think you are a recruiter. That's true even if you slap the word "programmer" and "CS degree" in a couple of places.
If you believe your webpage portrays you as a programmer, I suggest you might want to work on your messaging. Consider the possibility that your in-person messaging is similarly off.
(Of course, you seem pretty successful as a recruiter/author/interview coach, so perhaps leave the messaging as is and just be more aware of it.)
This is about someone talking to me AFTER A TALK ABOUT CODING and starting a sentence with, "So when you were a recruiter at Google, ..."
I wasn't there. I can't rule out the possibility that you a) didn't list this talk on your site, b) discussed a completely different topic than all your other listed talks and c) convey a completely different impression than your online persona.
But I hope you can understand why I, and many others, find this claim a bit implausible.
This talk discussed coding at far more depth than the vast majority of recruiters could do. How many recruiters could tell you about big O time? Binary trees? Breadth first search? Not many.
Also, are you actually trying to argue that gender isn't a factor in how people perceive someone?
Tell me how you would like to brush off these examples:
1. Someone asking me at a conference exclusively for programmers where you MUST be a programmer to attend [there are no company booths or anything like that] if I've ever considered learning to code.
2. Someone asking me in my first week at Google if I'm new to marketing. This was in an office that was exclusively engineering. There was no marketing team there. I was just walking down the hall and said someone came up to say this.
3. At a small event where at least 50% of the people worked for Microsoft or Amazon, someone starting off the conversation with "So I assume you don't work for Microsoft or Amazon."
4. At an event which was very, very programmer heavy, someone walking up and saying "hey it must be great for you to meet all these programmers. At least you've got someone to fix your computer."
5. Someone referring to me at CES, where I was staffing the Google booth, as a "booth babe." (Keep in mind that CES doesn't really have booth babes, nor was I dressed at all like a booth babe.
6. Someone actually specifically admitting that he was surprised that I was teaching technical interview topics. He specifically said that he assumed otherwise because I was female.
7. On a technical interview video on YouTube, 2/3rds of the comments are either overtly sexual or overtly sexist (e.g., "I would've hit on the interviewer. I wouldn't be able to focus on the problems!", "Good tits").
This stuff happens all the time. Note that #1 through #5 had nothing to do with my working in the interview space. #6 and #7 is pretty clearly gender related.
As a person outside HR, I mentally lump the entire field into the one corner I interact with. I know it's technically wrong - once when I worked at a big company I met a non-recruiter HR person. But it's fairly normal.
Similarly, to non-tech people, I'm a programmer rather than a data scientist, and I used to be a professor rather than postdoc ("wtf is a postdoc?" "it's like professor but I get paid less").
Also, are you actually trying to argue that gender isn't a factor in how people perceive someone
I'm arguing that when a person who advertises themselves online as being in HR and gives talks about HR, it's plausible that people might perceive them as being in HR for non-sexist reasons.
Making the leap from "HR as a whole" to "the only part of HR I ever interact with" is just human nature.
But again, the situation isn't "someone looked at my website and thought I was a recruiter" or "someone saw that I was doing hiring consulting and thought I was a recruiter".
It's giving a talk which is talking in depth about technical topics, far more so than the vast majority of recruiters could do, and then having someone say, "So when you were a recruiter at Google..."
This is just one little example. Not a big deal. Except that things like this happen all the time. You can't just continue to brush them off as "oh, well, it was just because you do this other stuff that the person didn't even know about."
I'm glad you challenge people's stupid assumptions.
Assuming a person USED to adhere to a gender/race/group stereotype is a weird thing.