I stand by my whataboutism. A woman responding in a survey that she feels the victim of gender-based discrimination is doing nothing to substantiate her claim,

I stand by my whataboutism. A woman responding in a survey that she feels the victim of gender-based discrimination is doing nothing to substantiate her claim, not even giving her name if it was an anonymous survey. All it takes for her is to not get the promotion and some wheels grinding in her head going "Surely, it must be because I'm a woman". That kind of evidence does not weigh more heavily than evidence that exists in black-and-white in the form of rulebooks and institutional policy for funding agencies and science organizations which plainly state that women are to be put at an advantage. -- Some of the things I described were bits of anecdotal evidence. But the thing I wrote about the structure of the DOC scholarship is black-on-white evidence of discrimination against men, and many people commented with pointers to similar things. About the survey: The question is actually a leading question. Why is sexual harrassment and gender-based discrimination being put in the same category? That very phrasing already suggests "If your boss got a little drunk at the company event, leading him to say nice things about your perfume, you clearly have a very good reason to presume that you not getting the promotion has something to do with that. Do you agree that's what happened to you in the last year?" If you phrase it like that, and 93% of the women go "Well, ... no!" then, really, I must complement the upstanding gentlemen of Max Planck! About your third paragraph, which strikes me as a very recognizable feminist narrative from the 80s, just a few points that I'd raise as food for thought: (a) The way these organizations, in particular, work, it's not a game of musical chairs where you lose when you don't do the right thing at a key point in time. They are very flat organizations, more bazaar than cathedral, with reverse-hockeystick careerpaths. If you go away for a year, you just get to the same point in your career a year later. (b) Nowadays, men in Austria and Germany, when they have children, generally do take the opportunity that the law prescribes that parenting time can be split between man and woman. Not a single one of the men that I grew up with in Austria was an exception to that rule when they had a child. Not a single male colleague that had a child during the time I was working for a German company was an exception to that rule. When their wives interrupted their careers, so did they. Again, anecdotal. But there you go. (c) Austria is one of the countries with the lowest Gini-coefficients in the world. If everybody earns the same, what is the point of that "money is power is status and women don't have any" narrative? Many women prefer to be teachers, nurses, etc. If that doesn't lessen their status in society, then how do you explain it to a 5-year-old girl that wants to play with dolls, not robots, that you think that that's a problem?