Hacker News Reader

Comment by DoreenMichele | Hacker News Reader

No, I'm not going to bother.

I appear to be the highest ranked woman on Hacker News. It has failed to get me significant career contacts or substantial income. I have not eaten today. I have 50 cents to my name. I was homeless for nearly six years.

I am shitposting on HN because I am too hungry, tired and out of sorts to do anything better and I am sick to death of trying to point out the obvious to people who absolutely do not want to hear it.

Anecdotally: I was a homemaker for years. I have six years of college and lots of evidence that I'm competent. I cannot turn it into a "career" or adequate income.

My ex got to take his lovely resume and keep working and he bought a house and remarried and yadda. Because the years he spent working at his career while I cooked his meals and raised our kids is something he can bank on and I can't.

View on HN

Sorry to hear about your situation, and thanks for taking my question in good faith.

I see, basically a stay at home wife/mother is not adequately compensated for her time spent at home maintaining it and taking care of the children.

In the west, this is still a choice though, right? These days I don't think anyone can "bank" on their spouse staying at home while they work. In those years, you had the choice of going to work. For better or worse (I personally think children need at least one parent in early development years), you stayed at home and took care of them.

My last serious boyfriend was Iranian. He treated me with more respect than any American man ever has and Farsi, like Japanese, only has a single gender-neutral pronoun. He had nasty, filthy sayings about sucking up to women in power equivalent to standard sayings I already knew for sucking up to men in power. I had never heard the equivalent in my life.

Knowing him was a huge, huge personal growth experience and helped me figure out how to stand up for myself and insist men not shit all over me every single step of the way in life. Which is probably one of the reasons I appear to be the highest ranked woman on Hacker News.

So I do have some insights into how women get treated in the Middle East. And before anyone jumps up to tell me my last boyfriend must have been some kind of statistical outlier, that's the same BS excuse people are making in this same discussion for American women who get treated like property in some parts of the US.

It amounts to "La la la not listening. Don't confuse me with the facts."

Certainly, there are differences. But as someone who is still suffering terribly the consequences of having been born female, I find it personally galling for people to act like I'm some kind of loon for pointing out the differences aren't as dramatic as we want to imagine.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com