I think enough are due to societal environment that this is something we can work on, but not by arbitrarily saying things like "We want to hire more women in tech."

I posted something of a "case study" in this discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21695925

It's currently downvoted and has one not very nice reply. I guess it's far less of a shit show than it really "should" be, but this is kind of par for the course. People want to believe that sexism is some nebulous problem "out there" and it's not anything they, personally, are doing and if you try to point out what can be done differently in the here and now, well, people are offended and use that to justify doubling down on mistreating people who are already suffering from social exclusion based on gender, skin color, whatever.

I've had college classes in things like Social Psychology and Negotiation and Conflict Management. I'm a woman and I was one of the top three students of my graduating high school class and then I spent about two decades doing the full-time homemaker thing and wondering where the hell my life went wrong that I didn't get the two-career couple modern American dream that I had expected.

So I know a lot about the space. I've read a lot of books on women's issues and I spent a lot of time in therapy and so forth, but most people don't really want to hear what I have to say. It makes them uncomfortable.

Some points I have been trying to make on HN for years:

1. Most men will not genuinely engage me in a substantive and positive way that leads to some kind of professional development or professional opportunity. They either argue with me or they hit on me. Neither fosters the kind of professional connections I need.

Among other things, I need people to talk with me in earnest about my work. I need people to promote my work, which historically has just not been done. Only recently has anyone other than me apparently posted any of my writing to HN that wasn't basically mud slinging and gossip.

And I think I can't get that primarily because men basically are nice to women when they are looking for sex and that's pretty much it. And they actively avoid being too nice to any woman they aren't trying to sleep with for fear of it having some kind of negative outcome, such as an unintended affair or career-damaging gossip.

2. I need income and no one really wants to hear that. I was a homemaker for years and the things I'm good at combined with my gender cause people to feel that I am supposed to do nice things for them out of the goodness of my heart because I care like I'm their mother. I have a pretty good idea where that pattern comes from, but it's a broken mental model that harms the incomes and lives of a great many women. This shitty expectation that I should benefit others for free out of the goodness of my heart was hung on me even when I was literally homeless.

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Decades of trying to sort out my own problems and reading up on what happens with other women has me convinced that the lack of ability to seriously connect with men socially in a professional way is a huge barrier to professional development. I'm convinced that a lot of female-led startups fail because they don't get those small nudges about what needs to happen with the business or code base that men get from having a beer with buddies or whatever and discussing it casually. So pivots happen much later and involve much larger changes and it's deadly to a lot of businesses.

I've been on HN for over a decade. Only in recent weeks do I have contacts via HN with men who will talk with me via email about something other than personal bullshit. I've been exchanging emails with two different men met through HN about housing issues.

Two contacts is something I should have been able to come up with in the first year, not more than a decade later. Everyone else has basically either emailed me to bond personally while doing not a fucking thing to further my professional goals, was actively trying to victimize me because they were shitty people, or they were hitting on me or they were writing me basically out of pity as their good deed for the day and not because they really had anything meaningful to discuss with me in earnest.

I feel I've been endlessly patient with a truly appalling situation and it hardly budges and if I get frustrated and upset because I'm still dirt poor and still can't make my life work and my gender is a very large factor there, then I get amazingly shitty feedback like it's somehow my fault for being rude or something. So basically no matter how virtuous I am, it's never enough and there is always some shitty BS excuse to blame me for it.

This boils down to "People don't really want it to change." It doesn't directly negatively impact the men here that they are aware of, so not their problem that there is a woman in their midst who routinely can't afford enough food to eat every day.

I'm quite fed up and if I had some means to go postal and murder a bunch of people that in my mind are "at fault," I probably would at this point. I just have no means to somehow blow up HN and multiple people met through HN.

I no longer know what to do. Being patient, diplomatic, articulate, long-suffering and blah blah blah isn't solving it. At the rate I'm going, I might have a middle class income in another hundred years, assuming I live that long and it's mind boggling to me that people who routinely claim they are interested in addressing issues like sexism are amazingly content to continue to basically step over my body in the gutter and mutter to themselves "Not my problem."

So the world isn't likely to change because the world doesn't actually want to change. It would rather look for excuses and justifications than viable solutions.