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Comment by nitrogen | Hacker News Reader

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.

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.

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.

This doesn’t have to be universally true to be true for her. I also didn’t really see her claiming that this is universally true.

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

It's not an idealogical battle. And you aren't the mod.

It has nothing to do with the article and it is idealogical.

I never claimed to be a mod.

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.

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