| I have a Certificate in GIS. I worked at a Fortune 500 company for over 5 years in a Pink Collar Ghetto department. I wanted a job in the IT department, where jobs generally paid better. In all the years I worked there, I met only one person who knew what GIS was without me having to explain it. He was a senior programmer in the department I wanted a job in. He asked me for a date, thereby making it vastly less likely that I would be able to work there (in his department). I'm sure he stopped to think about whether or not it would tank his career to date me. No, it wouldn't. I'm equally sure he didn't bother to wonder how the question would impact my future at the company. (I'm sure he also never wondered what my educational background might do for the company. I imagine he would have wondered if I could do something for his department if he hadn't been thinking of me as a sex object.) I also appear to be the only woman to have ever spent time on the leader board of HN. Over the course of nine+ years, I've established exactly one useful contact through HN. I've been endlessly mocked for thinking I could use HN to network and put up with endless crap that I don't really want to get into. A piece of my writing hit the front page in January. It got more than 60k page views. This did not result in a single tip or new Patreon supporter. Instead, someone wrote me around the same time about a two month old comment where I talked about being suicidal over the sexism I face on HN. He offered to do a fundraiser for me out of sympathy. I wrote back and said I would rather be taken seriously for my work and pointed him to the piece with 60k+ page views. He didn't reply to that. I am routinely treated like a charity case, not like someone with something of value to offer that's worth money. I'm on day six of a fast that is partly rooted in waiting for a deposit I expected Friday and still don't have and partly rooted in my inability to figure out how to turn my skills into money because I have the wrong bits between my legs to get taken seriously and paid for my work. |
One of the first jobs I took (in IT) was for a large regional airline. After I had worked there for about a year, a position opened up that would have amounted to a promotion, both in pay and position. I had both the experience for the position, as well as a good reputation in the company. Further, my supervisor (with whom I had a good relationship) was in charge of the hiring effort, so I figured I had a pretty good in. Ultimately I was passed over for the position because my supervisor was a socially awkward man who used his position in the company to hire attractive women in hopes that they might one day sleep with him. He ended up hiring an (attractive) woman that worked nearby in accounting. She had no IT experience. I left because of this, and he hired two additional (unqualified) women this way before he got a little too touchy-feely and ended up fired.
I'm a man, in case you're wondering.
About ten years later I was working for a large healthcare provider. A position opened up for a senior software engineer and most of the software engineers in my department applied for it. Ultimately the head of IT ended up hiring an (attractive) data scientist from a different department, who had no experience in project management or software engineering. Everyone thought it was super weird until it came to light that he had hired her because she was his mistress and he was looking for a way to spend more time with her without arousing suspicion. He was also fired.
More years later, I put in a very competitive bid for some programming work with a company whom I had previously done contract programming work and had a good relationship with. Ultimately they selected someone else for the contract. Since I knew the owners, I contacted them directly to ask if there were anything I could have done to improve my bid. They explained to me that because they were a minority owned business (women) and were both of under-represented orientations (they were both lesbians) that they needed to select a contractor that reflected that, so they paid nearly twice as much to a small startup whom they had heard was also owned by lesbians. The project failed and they ended up paying almost three times as my bid.
Nobody I mentioned ended up ruined. The first two moved on to other jobs. The company that paid three times as much? Still around. They all paid a penalty for their bad decisions, though. Some people never do. Some people are just awful and life rewards them for it. It's not fair, but all you can really do is move on, try again, and do your best not to get bitter about the cards you've been dealt. I hope things get better for you.