I am unemployable because I'm a white male whose in his 40s, has a family, and because somehow, in this industry experience is a bad thing.
It amazes me how intolerant of age and differing opinion tech culture is.
It wouldn't have helped if you were a minority either: in fact that can be even harder - at least around here.
But it is annoying in a special way to hear about that male privilege thing and know it means next to nothing - and still be told you should feel bad about it.
It's a lot like privilege in the operating systems sense. sudo isn't a bad program because it has root privileges. The kernel doesn't need to apologize for running in a privileged CPU mode. But sudo and the kernel both have abilities that regular userspace programs don't - and the ability to cause damage that regular userspace programs don't. They (or more specifically, their authors) need to be aware that they're privileged, be careful about doing things with the privilege by mistake, and realize that other programs can't do the same things they can. But that doesn't mean that they can do everything, or that it's their fault if there's something they're unable to do, and it certainly doesn't mean that it's meaningful or productive for them / their authors to feel bad about the privilege.
In my childhood girls were never beaten. Boys were by each other.
During my studies girls got extra study points for higher education - just for being girls. IIRC this held true even for studies who were mostly girls anyway, like nurse and chemistry. (This has been fixed to some degree now I think so boys will now get extra study points if they apply for nurse studies.)
At work they count and celebrate how many women we have. In a way it feels obvious since we want equality. But lets not pretend it's 50/50 if two equal candidates come through the door and hiring one of them will make your stats look nicer.
One key quote: “Were Brown to accept women and men at the same rate, its undergraduate population would be almost 60 percent women instead of 52 percent—three women for every two men.”