[DoreenMichele]

No, she wouldn't. If the world has broken her of talking about it, obviously, she wouldn't.

I'm giving you my take as a woman. But go ahead and do the PC dismissal as more concrete evidence that what I'm saying is both true and utterly socially unacceptable.

[xenocratus]

If you're already convinced the world is as you see it, there's no point having a discussion. The reality is that the world is a _really_ complex place, and one narrative simply doesn't cover everything, we're not all the same, not all companies are the same, not all societies/groups/cities/nations are the same.

I'm aware that women are disadvantaged in some cases, maybe even in companies that put a lot of effort into promoting them. But there are places where the opposite is happening. I used to work in a big tech corporation that was pushing this quite a lot - if they got two applicants, one was male one was female and they were roughly equally qualified, managers were expected to choose the female. This did make the gender diversity quite incredible, even in software engineering teams - I was in a team that was 50-50 male-female (this wasn't a 4 person team either). Have a look at [1], [2], [3], as well.

At the same time I don't want to discount your experience - there are plenty of awful people out there of all genders and races, and there's no excuse for stuff like that. We need to try and rat out discrimination, whichever way it points.

[1] National hiring experiments reveal 2:1 faculty preference for women on STEM tenure track - https://www.pnas.org/content/early/2015/04/08/1418878112

[2] Gender discrimination in hiring: An experimental reexamination of the Swedish case - https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...

[3] Man Up and Take It: Gender Bias in Moral Typecasting - https://journals.aom.org/doi/abs/10.5465/AMBPP.2019.15459abs...

[DoreenMichele]

The OP said: In my opinion, this attitude she's portraying is a dangerous attitude to have. This victimhood seems core to her identity. I'm not trying to shame the condition, I'm trying to say that the condition shouldn't become some core part of your identity.

So if you are a woman, it's not okay to say "My gender is an obstacle to my career success and it's literally crazy making." And if you do the more socially acceptable thing of chalking it up to a personal problem like depression, then some internet stranger is free to malign you and your presumed victim mentality.

If another woman tries to say "Hey, maybe she has a legitimate reason for feeling victimized and it isn't just some kind of neurotic BS" on a male dominated forum where the comment occured, she gets a pile on of downvotes and various replies that more or less boil down to "How dare you make such an observation!"

I wasn't looking for a fight. I made a comment as someone with firsthand experience of how frustrating it can be to try to pursue a career as a woman in a man's world. A zillion people are vilifying me for it.

Why do so many people feel some need to try to shut me down and act like it's a bad faith comment in violation of the guidelines?

The reactions to my observation are over the top. The observation itself is incredibly mild.

I think I'm done here. It is probably a waste of my time to keep responding to comments where there is some kind of presumed guilt on my part. It's all too easy for other people to decide that's evidence of how fighty and irrational and bad I am when none of that is true.

What's true here is that it's an overwhelmingly male forum and it's socially acceptable for millions of people to watch me starve and shrug and say "Not my problem" and it's not socially acceptable for me to say "I would like to stop starving and wish someone would help me figure out the super secret handshake to being allowed to earn a goddamned living. Please and thank you."

I'm done with this ridiculous nonsense for today.

[Snoozle]

I have seen a lot of your comments and articles over the past few months. I don't presume to put myself in your shoes, but my wife works in software engineering, and I work with several other women or wives of friends in the field. They have all had normal experiences, much like mine, with very few instances of anything being different for them because they are women.

I'm providing these anecdotes because you are providing your anecdotes and I figured it might make a discussion. As I said before, I have read your medium posts and your posts to this forum, and it seems that you are always fighting a battle that doesn't always exist (see your comment above that was flagged), but I feel like you are using the 'dismissal' of people viewing your arguments as irrelevant to the conversation as proof that the battle is happening and you're losing.

I don't understand why you might be starving or not making a living unless you are unemployable or have some type of issue that prevents you from performing at a normal level, as I have not known anyone in tech who could not earn a living unless they were struggling with something that prevented them from being able to work properly.

These are my anecdotes and they aren't facts or truths, I am just showing that the experience I have seen of women in tech does not intersect with your experiences, in a way that makes your points very foreign to me and I'm sure to others who don't share those experiences. Perhaps you are also in an 'experience bubble', and the world as you see it does not always conform to the pattern.

[andreskytt]

The world is not a uniform place. Not everything is Netherlands, not everything is the US. Some of my best colleagues in software have been women (older ones, too), I have hired women and never ever preferred anyone because of their gender. I have trouble even understanding the concept because of my autism spectrum disorder.

All of this can be an indication of all being fine where I live. Or it can be an indication of my biases being well hidden. And both can be different where you are. “Women don’t know the secret handshake” could be a thing wherever you are based in and it could be that there is some underlying issue you are not aware of. Or it can be both or neither. This is why people flag the comment: our experiences differ wildly and generalizations thus tend to rub a lot of people the wrong way.

Also, as a male, I’ve always had the feeling of “not knowing the secret handshake”. I don’t fit in, I don’t usually get a call when somebody starts something new. I don’t get invited to a night out. Has nothing to do with the gender, I’m just not a pleasant person to be around. I know this and am working on accepting this after years of trying to change it. Might not be applicable in your case, but one can experience very similar treatment that women apparently do in some places for very different reasons.

[mbrodersen]

I have personally hired a number of woman for senior developer jobs and they have all done well. Better than some of the guys I have hired. If it truly is impossible for woman to do well in a male dominated industry, how do you explain that?

[overgard]

What you have is a theory for why she's depressed. You may be correct or incorrect. Unless you secretly know her neither of us knows if that is true. For me, my depression had nothing to do with the outer world. There isn't always a reason, sometimes it's just biology.

It has nothing to do with what I was trying to say though.

My point is not that her depression is valid or invalid, it's that forming a sense of victimhood into your core identity is dangerous. I would give the same advice to men or women.

I'm not religious but consider this widely known prayer: "grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference". Victim mindset is the opposite, it's focusing on things you can't control. I personally think it's more useful to do the best with what is in your power.

[dahfizz]

"WHY I WILL NEVER NOT TALK ABOUT MY DEPRESSION" doesn't really seem like the "the world has broken her of talking about it"...