Personal accounts reveal the human impact of inequality and help inspire change. By reading real experiences you develop more compassion, empathy and a different understanding of what other people might experience. By reading these stories, we hope we can motivate you to take action on dismantling gender inequality in our world.
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Mansfield is the V.P. and Chief Customer Officer North America at Lenovo and said in her 2020 interview with Forbes Magazine, " 'Once I was in a meeting with several executives of a longstanding Lenovo customer, and the new CIO took one look at me and walked out of the meeting. He said he didn’t want to sit down with a woman.
I decided that I could either walk out angrily, which would have likely felt good in the moment, but would also put us at risk of losing the customer, or I could stay, showing a woman’s unique ability to stay calm in high-stress situations, and take the opportunity to tell the executives who stayed what I had to say. I chose to stay and because of that decision the company is still a long-term Lenovo customer to this day.' "
Read the full interview here > Forbes Magazine
"Whitney completed her PhD in Chemical and Biological engineering as the awardee of two national fellowships. Despite her numerous research accolades, Whitney expressed feeling disheartened and turned off from academia, in part, due to the gendered racial discrimination she says she experienced as a Black woman and as a second-generation immigrant. She recalls, 'It felt like I had to work harder to be treated with the same amount of respect and to be given the same amount of time from professors than other students did.'" From the same article, "Even as an undergraduate science student, Whitney says she struggled with discrimination. She remembers other students gossiping about her and suggesting that she was only accepted into competitive doctoral programs due to affirmative action. Consequently, she spent most of her time during her early graduate student career afraid to stop working for fear that she would confirm to others and herself that she actually was lazy and undeserving of her position."
*Names were changed in the original article to protect the identities of those involved
Read the full article here > Teen Vogue
"At age 14, as a freshman in high school, I started experiencing serious abdominal pain. I brushed it off and assumed the abdominal pain was somehow correlated with my extensive concussion history and persistent symptoms. The spring of my sophomore year, I broke my hip running track. Due to the nature of the fracture, my orthopedist did some blood work which showed malnutrition. He referred me to an eating disorder clinic, making that assumption since I was young, thin, and female, in addition to being a distance runner. I knew I did not have an eating disorder and my primary care physician agreed with me, so I never went... My allergist/immunologist was getting concerned with how sick I was and the frequency in which I was getting pneumonia. I told her how severe my abdominal pain was and she referred me to a different GI doctor who wanted an endoscopy and colonoscopy right away. Both showed inflammation, ulceration, and bleeding in my intestines and stomach. Capsule endoscopy confirmed the diagnosis: Crohn’s disease. Since my Crohn’s diagnosis, I have also been diagnosed with other autoimmune diseases including Sjogren’s, MCTD, Crohn’s-related arthritis, Henoch-Schönlein purpura, Berger’s disease, and chronic glomerulonephritis. I also have some non-autoimmune conditions such as persistent post-concussion syndrome, POTS, mastocytosis, and restless leg syndrome. My doctors believe that I had Crohn’s for eight years before being diagnosed and thus receiving treatment.
I am sure that my diagnoses were delayed due to the fact I am a young woman. My experiences have shown how biased the healthcare system is in how it treats men and women. I do not think it is wrong for doctors to ask about eating disorders in patients who present with malnutrition. However, it is sexist for doctors to assume that an eating disorder is the only plausible diagnosis, especially because this usually happens to women and girls."
Read the full interview here > Auto Immune Institute
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