All of my achievements are reduced to, "because you're a white male". All of my studying, my work ethic, my intelligence, my skill is somehow due to being male.

Working at the same company as my girlfriend, my rapid promotion and subsequent raise wasn't due to me learning programming in the evenings or my excel voodoo, reports, adopting new job functions... It was because I was a guy and so is my boss.

When I had a private meeting with the company president, who put me in contact with some of his "best people" to help my career growth, it was because the company president and myself are both dudes.

But, the higher level women at the company like me too, including my direct manager who is female. Why is that? Oh, it's because they probably just think I'm hot, apparently, not because I supplied a game-changing email scraper that gives them visibility of data they never had access to before.

I no longer share good news about my career growth.

There is no doubt that women have unique disadvantages in a male dominated industry, but not all of a man's success is due to his sex. Being told that my achievements are reduced, sometimes invalidated, because of this only forces me to aim higher - to try harder to make up for it.