4 ms·

She's a woman in a man's world. It's much more socially acceptable to say "I'm depressed" than to say "Doors don't open for me even though I am doing all the th

She's a woman in a man's world. It's much more socially acceptable to say "I'm depressed" than to say "Doors don't open for me even though I am doing all the things I get told I should do to make them open and I'm doing my best and nothing really works anyway. It's demoralizing." Women have long been given prescriptions for antidepressants in cases where "divorce" might have been a better prescription and so on. And you eventually get beat down by it. Even if it remains clear in your mind that your gender is a factor in things not working even though you work hard and do what you get told is the right thing to do and yadda, you eventually learn that saying it out loud not only will not get you any remedy, it will get you nothing but open hostility from other people.

nitrogen 5y ago
I'm doing my best and nothing really works anyway. This is probably something that most of us can relate to at some point in our lives.
- DoreenMichele 5y ago
  I don't know if that's supposed to be sympathetic or dismissive or what, but especially in combo with the downvotes, it's hard to not see it as dismissive. A woman says "It's not socially acceptable to talk about your gender being a factor in having trouble making your career work", gets downvoted to hell. People fail to see the irony. I've been on HN nearly twelve years as part of an overall good faith effort to sort my problems and make my life work and I am quite open about being dirt poor to the point of going hungry and being willing to work and wanting to improve my income and it failing to open doors for me. When I talk about "Most men don't really want to talk to me privately unless they are hitting on me" I get snide comments about how HN has no messaging system, as if people haven't heard of email. I'm telling you from firsthand experience this is amazingly demoralizing and crazy making and it isn't socially acceptable to talk about it no matter how much you can point to evidence that "My gender seems to be a factor in my intractable poverty" and no matter how carefully you word it to not be blamey or suggest people are doing you dirty with malice aforethought.
  - ketamine__ 5y ago
    Downvotes are because you aren't taking the author at face value because it appears you have an agenda. > Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
    - DoreenMichele 5y ago
      It's not an idealogical battle. And you aren't the mod.
      - ketamine__ 5y ago
        It has nothing to do with the article and it is idealogical. I never claimed to be a mod.
        DoreenMichele 5y ago
        Definition of idealogical: based on or relating to a system of ideas and ideals, especially concerning economic or political theory and policy. I'm not talking about ideology or political theory. I'm talking about "If a specific person's life is in the toilet due to social crap they have no power to fix, it gets pretty fucking depressing. And often it's vastly more socially acceptable to say I'm depressed than to say I'm oppressed and being denied opportunity for BS reasons" If you aren't the mod, quoting guidelines at me like I'm behaving badly when I'm not is a PC form of ad hominem. Ad hominems are also against the guidelines, FYI. I know the guidelines. I've been a member for more than a decade.
  - mbrodersen 5y ago
    I work with female senior software engineers and project managers, and have personally hired quite a few. They seem to be doing great, are well respected, and doesn’t seem to have the problems you are advocating. So obviously what you consider to be universally true isn’t. My guess is that you have been unlucky and worked for companies with bad cultures? I have personally worked in a company that was toxic to everybody (male/female/…) and the only solution is to jump ship until you find a good one. They are out there.
overgard 5y ago
I can only take the author for her word, she didn't say anything like this in the article.
- DoreenMichele 5y ago
  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.
  - dahfizz 5y ago
    "WHY I WILL NEVER NOT TALK ABOUT MY DEPRESSION" doesn't really seem like the "the world has broken her of talking about it"...
  - xenocratus 5y ago
    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 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.pone.0245513 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.2019.15459abstract https://journals.aom.org/doi/abs/10.5465/AMBPP.2019.15459abs...

nitrogen 5y ago

I'm doing my best and nothing really works anyway. This is probably something that most of us can relate to at some point in our lives.

DoreenMichele 5y ago
I don't know if that's supposed to be sympathetic or dismissive or what, but especially in combo with the downvotes, it's hard to not see it as dismissive. A woman says "It's not socially acceptable to talk about your gender being a factor in having trouble making your career work", gets downvoted to hell. People fail to see the irony. I've been on HN nearly twelve years as part of an overall good faith effort to sort my problems and make my life work and I am quite open about being dirt poor to the point of going hungry and being willing to work and wanting to improve my income and it failing to open doors for me. When I talk about "Most men don't really want to talk to me privately unless they are hitting on me" I get snide comments about how HN has no messaging system, as if people haven't heard of email. I'm telling you from firsthand experience this is amazingly demoralizing and crazy making and it isn't socially acceptable to talk about it no matter how much you can point to evidence that "My gender seems to be a factor in my intractable poverty" and no matter how carefully you word it to not be blamey or suggest people are doing you dirty with malice aforethought.
- ketamine__ 5y ago
  Downvotes are because you aren't taking the author at face value because it appears you have an agenda. > Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  - DoreenMichele 5y ago
    It's not an idealogical battle. And you aren't the mod.
    - ketamine__ 5y ago
      It has nothing to do with the article and it is idealogical. I never claimed to be a mod.
      - DoreenMichele 5y ago
        Definition of idealogical: based on or relating to a system of ideas and ideals, especially concerning economic or political theory and policy. I'm not talking about ideology or political theory. I'm talking about "If a specific person's life is in the toilet due to social crap they have no power to fix, it gets pretty fucking depressing. And often it's vastly more socially acceptable to say I'm depressed than to say I'm oppressed and being denied opportunity for BS reasons" If you aren't the mod, quoting guidelines at me like I'm behaving badly when I'm not is a PC form of ad hominem. Ad hominems are also against the guidelines, FYI. I know the guidelines. I've been a member for more than a decade.
- mbrodersen 5y ago
  I work with female senior software engineers and project managers, and have personally hired quite a few. They seem to be doing great, are well respected, and doesn’t seem to have the problems you are advocating. So obviously what you consider to be universally true isn’t. My guess is that you have been unlucky and worked for companies with bad cultures? I have personally worked in a company that was toxic to everybody (male/female/…) and the only solution is to jump ship until you find a good one. They are out there.

overgard 5y ago

I can only take the author for her word, she didn't say anything like this in the article.

DoreenMichele 5y ago
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.
- dahfizz 5y ago
  "WHY I WILL NEVER NOT TALK ABOUT MY DEPRESSION" doesn't really seem like the "the world has broken her of talking about it"...
- xenocratus 5y ago
  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 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.pone.0245513 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.2019.15459abstract https://journals.aom.org/doi/abs/10.5465/AMBPP.2019.15459abs...