Did you ever want to be president when you grew up? Me? Never. Nor was I satisfied playing mommy despite the fact that my parents kicked other parents in the teeth to get me Cabbage Patch Kids back in the day. I played post office. I played car shop. I played WWF and Wonder Woman. I occasionally played tortured writer wringing my hair, speaking with a French accent and banging at a typewriter. I never played modern female executive or technology evangelist.

As a follow-up to last month’s column (“Ides of March,”) I attended the South By Southwest (SXSW) Interactive Festival in Texas to speak on a panel about women in leadership roles in the technology field. Here is an audience that typically speaks L337. They do not speak corporate bureaucracy, and definitely do not speak Foblish.

On this panel I had the pleasure of meeting and speaking with other women leaders and luminaries in their field: published authors, seasoned speakers, successful entrepreneurs and respected professionals. And then there’s me, wearing jeans and an “I Will Not Love You Long Time” tank top with a corporate jacket over it (clothes that I would wind up wearing for 48 hours straight due to a non-stop succession of in-depth technology discussions, media confluencey forums, general mischief and Austin microbrews).

What on earth could I say that might be of interest or inspiration?

All I could share was my story and my personal experience.

Gender disparity may continue to be an issue within the technology arena as fewer women go into formal studies in these fields. But consider my day job in the cable industry and you have a disparity of nearly 50 to 1. And yet I am a leader. I have a title, a window office and a parking spot with my name on it. I walk barefoot to the copier on days when my boss isn’t in the office. I’m almost done with my leadership training module and the meetings with my professional coach will soon come to an end. I am a leader. Now why has this prospect been so terrifying for most of my life?

My parents always told me that I could never run from my face. But on the other side of the coin, they told me that being invisible would keep me safe, which meant staying alive. These were the hard lessons I had learned while growing up outside of Detroit in the early ’80s and ’90s, when the auto industry was going through a slump and racial intolerance and hostility against Asians filled the void. People sported bumper stickers with huge mushroom clouds (i.e., Hiroshima and Nagasaki) that read “Made in the USA,” and Japanese automobiles were frequently vandalized. If you were Asian, you were a target. And you could wind up dead. After all, that’s what had happened to Vincent Chin, a Chinese American friend of my cousins. It was this environment that terrorized me; made me wary of being too visible while growing up. In some ways, it compromises my confidence with my own leadership abilities even today.