When Zuly Gonzalez, a former program manager for the National Security Agency, answers the phone at the cyber security firm she helped found, the caller often asks to speak with her business partner, assuming she is his secretary.

It’s demeaning and wrong, but at this point, it’s also such a stereotypical story of women in a male-dominated field that Gonzalez can’t help but laugh as she tells it.

“I try not to let that kind of thing affect me,” said Gonzalez, who is CEO of Light Point Security in Catonsville.

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“We as women do a disservice by focusing so much on the gender issue,” she said. “If our goal is to be treated equally, we should just be out there with the men.”

Gonzalez and every other woman in technology knows that’s the attitude they have to have if they want to succeed. But chin up, buck up can be a tough attitude to maintain for an entire career.

The dearth of women in technology and women in leadership positions is a well-documented, national problem. Women comprise about a quarter of the computer and math workforce and lead about 7 percent of venture-backed startup companies.

The story in Baltimore isn’t much different. Here, women hold 23 percent of tech jobs, according to market research by real estate services firm CBRE.

What sets Baltimore apart is a will — and a way — to change the narrative.

In the Baltimore area, women lead many of the incubators and other organizations charged with attracting and growing new companies. Baltimore’s Emerging Technology Centers; Betamore; incubators at University of Maryland, Baltimore County and University of Maryland Baltimore; and Johns Hopkins University’s tech transfer office are all led by women.

Now they’re leveraging that leadership power to set an example for women entrepreneurs, to emphasize diversity in the workplace and to bring more women into the field.

But this isn’t just about balancing the scales. Diversity in technology could be an economic windfall for Baltimore, a city that is trying to set itself apart from startup meccas like Silicon Valley, which is often criticized for being homogeneous and unwelcoming of women.

The challenge cannot be one women shoulder alone. If Baltimore wants a diverse and inclusive tech community, everyone must share the burden.

“It’s not just a women’s issue. It’s an everybody issue,” said David Wise, a longtime venture capitalist, executive and adviser in Baltimore’s tech community. “We’re trying to build a stronger innovation economy in Baltimore and Maryland, and we have to harness all the talent and all the brainpower and all ideas to make it happen.”

“It’s just common sense to be as inclusive as possible,” he added.

Strong female leaders who others can turn to for inspiration and mentorship are crucial to bringing up more women in business. Baltimore happens to have a lot of women like this: Deborah Tillett, a 25-year veteran of the tech sector and the president of Emerging Technology Centers; Christy Wyskiel, the former investment banker and venture capitalist who now runs Johns Hopkins’ technology commercialization program; Jan Baum, a trailblazer in 3-D printing who heads Howard County’s 3D Maryland program. Jennifer Meyer is leading Betamore’s rebirth; Ellen Hemmerly is at the helm of University of Maryland, Baltimore County’s research and development park; and Jane Shaab is the executive director at the University of Maryland BioPark.

These women have spent decades in the business climbing, sometimes clawing their way to the top.

“My favorite line is that Ginger Rogers did everything Fred Astaire did, except in high heels and backwards, and that’s sometimes how I feel about women in tech,” Tillett said. “We’re doing everything. We’re just not getting recognized as often.”

The landscape is starting to change, thanks to growing public awareness of the disparities between men and women in technology.

At ETC, 45 percent of the 103 companies the organization works with are led by women or minorities — pretty good odds, considering just 8 percent of startups nationally are led by women, Tillett said.

There are more groups dedicated to getting women involved in tech, more classes to encourage girls to pursue the field in school, and more initiatives that support women-led businesses than there were when Tillett got her start.

That’s good, of course, with caveats.

“By the nature of forming a group, it can become an isolation exercise,” said Meyer, who in January took over as CEO of Betamore.

Women’s groups can give members a sense of belonging and help them establish relationships with people they can relate to. Despite the best intentions, this approach can ultimately have the opposite effect: carving out a niche for women, then leaving them stuck in it.

This is why Meyer and others are looking for ways to rally the entire tech community behind the idea of diversity.

When Meyer and Betamore’s top leadership set out to form a new board for the organization, they paid special attention to diversity and worked hard to represent an array of ages, races and gender. Their results — 11 of the advisory board’s 67 members are women — show that there is a need for more women in tech.

Meyer and Wise, who currently works as a venture advisor for the Abell Foundation, are creating a group dedicated to devising more ways to attract women to Baltimore’s technology community. They say startups are looking for diversity in a place to call home.

That was the case for Margaret Roth and her two co-founders of Yet Analytics Inc., who brought their data analytics startup to ETC because of its diversity.

“It’s been so much more rewarding and a better experience to have someone like Deb making these connections, pushing us out into places in a way that’s about what we’ve done and what we’ve accomplished versus the fact that this is a woman-founded company,” said Roth, who is the company’s chief marketing officer. “It’s a different mentality.”

With Tillett in her corner, Roth has never felt Yet Analytics got a meeting with an investor or a business prospect because someone was being charitable to a women-led business.

Roth wants to help more women in technology make the same mentorship connections. She and Sehreen Noor Ali in 2013 founded EdTechWomen, a networking group that is open to anyone interested in education technology and seeing more women in the field.

“This is about anyone who wants to support women leadership in this space, period,” Roth said.

The group has chapters in a dozen cities and plans to expand to a dozen more over the next six months.

Roth is among a new generation of female tech entrepreneurs that, hopefully, will not need to claw to the top.

Leaders in Baltimore’s tech community point to women like Roth and Gonzalez, the Light Point CEO, as success stories. They say they will keep pushing until a successful woman-led tech firm isn’t an exception but the norm.