The patriarchy is what enabled and encouraged you to have an interest and education in computer science in the first place :) if you had been born in a woman’s body in the same time period, you would have been discouraged from that path passively through cultural messaging and actively by your peers and mentors–all decisions made by men. To this day, men outnumber women in STEM fields by roughly a 5-to-2 ratio, and that number is only where it is as a result of deliberate outreach to women of all ages.

I’m not trying to detract from your work ethic or the quality of the output you produced or how hard you had to work to get to where you are-- I’m just saying that if you were a woman, it would have been that much harder, and that is how you benefited from the patriarchy without actively participating from it.

Much like white privilege, one of the things that makes patriarchy and matriarchy so insidious is that you do not have to directly engage in it in order to benefit from it if you look like you belong to the gender in charge