I've been contemplating your remark and how or if to reply.
I recently had a conversation where the lady I was talking to basically said (paraphrasing for brevity) "all men bad, always" and I'm really not sure what she even wanted to achieve. Some kind of perceived revenge maybe? I ended up disengaging and it left me feeling rather deflated. If I'm bad by default and there's nothing I can do to change that, why care at all?
This is a really thorny issue -- that there are people who have been so hurt that they see no path forward. Trying to reach them is really difficult and complicated and puts you at risk of being burned, which tends to leave them painted into a corner that they can't find their way out of.
I'm glad you know other women that are more reasonable and do not feel like giving up over this one incident.
But I do worry sometimes that even that can backfire, because I've witnessed another situation (on Twitter) where a lady complained that men who didn't get her joke tweet were mansplaining about how what she wrote was wrong, that they were explaining her (purposeful) error to her because she was a woman. Except others replied with their own versions of the joke and they too were getting "mainsplained" too, even though many were themselves men. That is, some people were misunderstanding the joke and commenting, it wasn't anything to do with her being a woman. But she turned it into a gender issue.
To be fair to her, it gets really hard to not attribute certain patterns to your gender. It gets really hard to try to make that nuanced distinction that "Not everything is about sexism." and this also ends up being a thorny issue because trying to tell someone who is in that head space that they are wrong gets experienced by them as just another means to undermine them and gaslight them.
I think the best strategy is to try to avoid talking to women about their "personal" stuff. Try to not make it into a "personal" relationship when it really isn't.
I lived a really private life for a lot of years because I was a homemaker for roughly two decades and what I eventually came up with was this idea that women generally get treated like "private" individuals and men generally get treated like "public" people and the way men and women get socialized reinforces that pattern.
So men frequently have "personal" conversations with women in public settings that they wouldn't have with a man or in a way that they wouldn't have with a man and it happens so often that women don't realize "This is not normal and it is not good for your work life."
It's normal for them in their lives and they don't see that this is a problem.
Men focus on the importance of networking and women tend to be better at the social thing and at making personal connections and that tends to be one of their strengths. It is one of mine and I have been baffled and frustrated that it doesn't turn into professional connections.
People talk to me and they want to see me as their new best friend for life or their one true love or something like that and it ends up being enormously frustrating for me because they generally don't have as much to give back to me as I have to give to them in that regard and what I most need is more income and that's never something they want to help with.
People don't want to pay money to their friends for their friendship. Men don't want to pay money to their girlfriend for being their girlfriend.
And people also don't want to open doors for me professionally once it veers into that "personal relationship" space. And it's not simply because they are being selfish jerks or something.
If a man is sleeping with a woman or hopes to, it can be hard to vouch for her. It can be hard to overcome the public perception that "You're just saying that because you are sleeping with her and I can't actually trust what you say about this woman."
I spent a lot of years being a walking, talking train wreck waiting to happen. I tend to "turn heads" so to speak. I tend to be attention grabbing, but all that attention was directed at me as an individual and I didn't know how to get it onto my work and translate that into traffic for my websites and income.
So what I will say is if you are male, try to focus on her work and try to avoid getting into her personal shit. Women being overly personal in work settings is part of what holds women back.
Not everyone is your Fwend at work and women can be slow to get that memo. That was one of my biggest stumbling blocks because I was a homemaker for a lot of years and the people I had relationships with were basically all friends and family. For years and years, I didn't have a boss or any coworkers, etc.
And it's really hard to do this because it seems like just telling her "You need to stop doing X" would help her but it won't because that is just you getting into her personal business and that de facto reinforces this pattern where women relate to other people in an overly personal fashion and people relate to women in an overly personal fashion.
If it isn't your sister, mother, wife, etc, don't get into that with them and don't talk about it as her problem. Talk about it as "not my problem."
"Oh, well, sorry, I barely know you. This is outside the scope of our relationship. I'm going to go have a coffee now. Catch you later."
With enough repetition women can get the memo.
If you want to help her career, give her work some positive attention. Tell other people she does good work. Tell her she does good work. Tell her you would like to help her connect with people who would appreciate her work.
Make sure the focus is her work and not her as an individual. Keep saying it until it slowly sinks in. Rinse and repeat on the "I'm going to go have a coffee now. This is not my problem." when she tries to turn you into a shoulder to cry on because she has big feels about you giving her work positive attention because no one has done that before and blah blah blah.
Men learn that it's not about them. It's about their work.
Women frequently seem to not learn that. I was very slow to learn that and my gender and the life I lived for a lot of years as a homemaker and the way other people reacted to me because of all that made it super hard to sort this out because I would talk to people like they were my friend and people who were emotionally starved would eat that up and then not know how to say "Look, that's the problem." and no one knew how to say "So, show me your work. Do you have samples I could see and maybe share with some of my contacts?"
People still tend to err on the side of replying to me on HN as if comments I make about gendered issues are just me whining about my personal problems and me being in need of advice and it continues to be a pattern I have to actively work at shutting down.
Everyone wants to make that personal connection to me and that always ends up in a pattern of meeting their emotional needs at my expense and continuing to fail to open doors for me professionally.
So if you really want women to reach some kind of professional parity with men, stop being so personal with them. Get your own emotional needs met some other way and stop investing in having these personal conversation with women and let them know this is not your thing and you want none of it but don't alienate or shun them.
Instead, talk about their work. Help them with their work. Promote their work.
I think women relate less to their work than men do and I think this is the crux of why men's careers tend to stronger than women's careers.
I worked at Aflac for a few years. The CEO at the time that I was there was, I think, the son of one of the three founders (they were brothers) and he made the risky decision to go with the Aflac duck commercials and it made the company a household name.
Aflac had something of value that was underrecognized. If you have something of value that is underrecognized and you add some promotion to it, you can really rake in the dough.
But if you don't have much of value, lots of advertising amounts to a con job, basically.
So when women try to network, sometimes they are trying to promote themselves when there isn't much to promote. It ends up being just an empty social activity and not a career maker because they haven't really done the work and they aren't really promoting the work.
So those are my rambling thoughts at 1am my time, for what it's worth.