Your comments haven't been removed, but I am going to warn you about invalidating someone else's lived experiences. That is not okay here. Keep that in mind.

It takes a while for people to come forward and say this sort of stuff. If immediately after you report harassment your career takes a nose dive, just about the last thing you're going to do is speak up publicly about it. Because then you're not just the person who reported harassment, you're the person who complained publicly. And that most definitely is career suicide. Instead, you try and fix things. Maybe you move to a different place, where hopefully no one has heard that you reported. You try and keep your head down and work and prove yourself. You try and wait for the person causing the problems to leave.

If you've dedicated yourself to a career, you don't just give up.

We only tend to hear about these sorts of cases when the woman has exhausted ALL of her options and given up entirely on that field. Most of the victims who are pressing cases with the armed services have already left, or been forced out of service. Look at what's happening right now with the CEO of reddit. She's only suing her former company because she's gone from there and safe within another job. Another job where she's top dog and it's much less likely that the lawsuit will cause problems for her there.

My guess is that sadly, this woman is largely right. The events that shaped her view of things happened a few decades ago, but that's still pretty recent. Remember, she's not the only person that lived through these events and were shaped by them. A lot of men were too. And my guess, is that if she'd seen positive change in the intervening decades, she'd no longer be advising students of this. She's likely seen dozens if not hundreds of cases over the years. Some have reported, some haven't. And she's kept track of what happened in their careers.

I get wanting to think that things have changed and that they're better. But it's also pretty ridiculous to simply refuse to believe her learned experiences. This is her life and her career and she's giving career advice based on her experiences. Feel free to disregard that advice, but invalidating her experiences and deciding that you know better is not okay here.

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