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.
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...
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.
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.
