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Comment by dijit | Hacker News Reader

I've been told directly by HR that "your next hire better be a woman", and not in a joking way.

So, anecdatum, yes, but until studies come out like the one posted then nobody is allowed to even express these anecdotes.

BTW that experience was not a fun one as it really harmed my self-image, I really felt like I was less valuable as a person and made me quite bitter for a while, I will admit that right-wing rhetoric became very comforting, luckily I was not seduced but I can understand how people could be.

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That sucks, it shouldn't have happened. Assuming it happened as presented rather than being a critical look at your hiring practices it's pretty clearly discriminatory.

> nobody is allowed to even express these anecdotes

I mean, you just did and don't appear to be that concerned about someone linking it back to you.

I find the whole "we aren't allowed to talk about this" thing a bit of an ironic response here, because if you take a look at this thread it started with a woman sharing her experiences from her career, with them being brushed off as anecdotal, and obviously, she's privileged, and it's men who are disadvantaged now.

It looks to me like she got the exact same pushback the male anecdote did. Is she also "not allowed to express her anecdotes"?

I don't care because I am very intentional about the fact that I present myself as transparently as possible, it is certainly not comfortable to do so, and there is a very large part of my mind that is set on the notion that someone will put me on a list of nazi's or try to get me fired or something because I dissented against the mainstream ideology.

Please don't mistake the courage to speak up as being easy, because it's really not, it's deeply uncomfortable and a quite scary.

It's fair to liken my experiences to others, I don't think that anyone shouldn't be permitted to share anecdotes. However the major differing factor here is that there are intentional support networks along with a social understanding that we should be sympathetic to the anecdotes of women. Unintentionally that forces out the anecdotes of men. Perhaps because unscrupulous men use them as bad faith attacks to drown out conversations that women needed to have in the past- however given than there were 8 workshops explicitly for women in gaming last year in my building and 2 for any other kind of gaming (meaning women were permitted to attend 100% of the workshops and I was permitted to attend 20%), they definitely have a space to express their anecdotes.

If anyone is drowning them out, it's a fringe minority.

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