[Nokinside]

Being ugly, middle aged woman is like invisibility cloak in certain work environments.

In one of my first jobs I worked with female electrical engineer like that. It took me few years to gradually discover how good she was. She had good ideas and solved problems but we somehow forgot where the idea came after we talked it over. It somehow became team effort. After someone was boasting how they had high scores in Mensa test, she just casually mentioned that she had scored 155.

I later started a company with her. The best decision I have ever made. Imagine working with Elon Musk who is enthusiastic about chess, crocheting and mushroom picking.

[justaguyhere]

I had similar experience. We had a middle aged woman at work (we were all fresh college kids at the time). Nobody took her seriously ever - she talked weird, dressed weird (tennis shoes to work etc) and the girls in my team especially weren't kind to her.

Everything changed soon after she joined our team. She had never seen Java code before, but she was able to guess what we were doing wrong and likely where, and she was often correct. That is when I learned common sense and imagination are more important than just plain knowledge (and fancy degrees).

This is true for men too - but different set of parameters, height being one of them.

Good looks can make one's life much easier

[silveroriole]

Wow, grim. As someone who’s on their way to being an ugly middle aged female engineer this is tough reading. Did you ever tell her you spent years completely discounting her and ‘stealing’ her ideas? I wonder what she thinks about that.

[umvi]

> Did you ever tell her you spent years completely discounting her and ‘stealing’ her ideas

I don't think the "discounting"/"stealing" was intentional... and it's not necessarily exclusive to women. "Selling yourself" is a skill that even men struggle with, especially the quiet, introverted, but definitely intellectual types.

[silveroriole]

Selling yourself can be hard, but I have to say in my time of browsing HN I’ve never seen a male engineer complain about being completely ignored in their job in the way the commenter describes. Overlooked in interviews due to ageism, yes, but once they get in I don’t have the impression it would take a middle-aged man with an IQ of 155 YEARS to get out of ‘invisibility mode’ (and would his attractiveness come into it at all? Probably not, if most of his coworkers are also male). If anyone wants to share their experience here to prove I’m wrong, please do!

[derefr]

> I have to say in my time of browsing HN I’ve never seen a male engineer complain about being completely ignored in their job in the way the commenter describes

To be frank, that's because in most environments a male engineer would be told it's their own fault for not trying harder to get recognized / pushing their "personal brand" more (i.e. they'd be social punished for pointing out this problem, rather than getting social justice.)

Men internalize this early in life, and so don't bother to complain about such things no matter how often it happens to them.

[oblio]

> Selling yourself can be hard, but I have to say in my time of browsing HN I’ve never seen a male engineer complain about being completely ignored in their job in the way the commenter describes.

As a stereotype, men are more aggressive, even the quiet ones. After all, there's all that extra testosterone.

I'd guess that if men are overlooked they're more likely to lash out. And also because of this, other men tend to be more careful around other men, because they know in general that other men can lash out.

Again, everything I say is based on stereotypes, your mileage may vary, etc.

[DoreenMichele]

FWIW, it's possible she intentionally positioned herself that way to some degree.

Women tend to have a lot of their ideas stolen anyway. Being "invisible" and unattractive at least cuts back on the sexual harassment.

Being a female engineer means she probably was making a lot more money than most women will ever make. She may have mostly made her peace with the fact that it sucks that if she were a man, she probably would have gotten more credit and so forth, but for a woman, she had a fairly good life.

There are women making good money who are just mad as hell at the injustices in their lives, but some women are more pragmatic than that. Many of them will not admit that publicly because they don't want the assholes of the world to infer that it's perfectly fine to crap all over women. After all, this woman is "happy" with it!

But their internal metric can be along the lines of "I live in a first world country. In the grand scheme of things, I overall have it pretty good. There are literally billions of people worse off than me. I am just not going to waste my time pointlessly on bellyaching over this."

[valtism]

You are assuming a lot about this woman who you have entirely no information about.

[DoreenMichele]

No, I'm not. I'm positing a possible alternate explanation, something other than "straight up victim," for a woman who reportedly was extremely competent, with a high IQ, a successful career and so forth.

I am doing so based on what I have known about the life and attitudes of a serious career woman I was quite close to and based on my own first-hand experience as a 55 year old woman who was one of the top students in my graduating class, had a corporate job for a time and other life experience.

[Nokinside]

Oh she knows. She also knows that there was nothing she could do. If she pushed back she was being a bitch. If not, nobody notices. We became friends and started company together. She was already 20 years older than me. She is now financially independent and retired. In the end she did better than anyone else in the company where we met.

This happened in late 90's early 2000's so things may have changed.

[stronglikedan]

Why tell her something she already knew?