To build upon what others have commented here, it seems like an unfortunate reality of the hiring world is that it has less to do with your raw technical skill

To build upon what others have commented here, it seems like an unfortunate reality of the hiring world is that it has less to do with your raw technical skill and more to do with "fits desired paper qualifications and societal expectations". Social signaling is a very real thing and stems from the people doing the hiring. They believe in social signaling, whether knowingly or not. They choose to hire someone they "get along with" rather than "inverts binary trees really well".