Sorry, I should have been precise about "recruitment consultant" rather than "recruiter". Gives you a tangential and irrelevant point to hit me with. As a pers

Sorry, I should have been precise about "recruitment consultant" rather than "recruiter". Gives you a tangential and irrelevant point to hit me with. As a person outside HR, I mentally lump the entire field into the one corner I interact with. I know it's technically wrong - once when I worked at a big company I met a non-recruiter HR person. But it's fairly normal. Similarly, to non-tech people, I'm a programmer rather than a data scientist, and I used to be a professor rather than postdoc ("wtf is a postdoc?" "it's like professor but I get paid less"). Also, are you actually trying to argue that gender isn't a factor in how people perceive someone I'm arguing that when a person who advertises themselves online as being in HR and gives talks about HR, it's plausible that people might perceive them as being in HR for non-sexist reasons. Making the leap from "HR as a whole" to "the only part of HR I ever interact with" is just human nature.