I find my gender is a barrier to getting traction and my experience is that it's due to patterns of this sort and not because most men intentionally want me to fail. But the cumulative effect of most men erring on the side of protecting themselves and not wanting to take risks to engage with me meaningfully really adds up over time and I think that tremendously holds women back generally.
I think gendered patterns of social engagement also contributed to the Theranos debacle. I've said that before and I feel like it tends to get misunderstood as well. (Though in the case of Theranos it runs a lot deeper in that she was actually sleeping with an investor.)
Which is why this needs to be discussed: So a path forward can be found. Our current default patterns aren't working well.
In my experience, one good example of how to do it right is vastly more powerful in solving social ills than any number of people being hung high and scapegoated for getting it wrong.
In fact, I generally feel that scapegoating people in a system where there are no good answers is actively counterproductive and helps keep things stuck. Hanging someone high for not knowing "the right answer" in a system that gives zero good options for how to handle X implicitly suggests that good answers exist and implicitly denies the reality that "We don't know how to do this dance. We don't have an answer for that."
It implicitly suggests there is a means to get this right when the reality is there isn't. So it actively distracts from real problem solving.
I would like to see more real problem solving in this space. As a dirt poor woman, I have a vested interest in seeing a world where there are answers for how to do this dance.
So far, I am mostly coming up empty under circumstances that suggest to me that my behavior is not the problem. The problem is the lack of good answers for how to do this dance.