I've been here more than ten years. I literally spent years doing all the stuff people say to do here to network, get taken seriously, etc.
It wasn't working because I got treated differently by essentially everyone due to my gender.
I was literally homeless for nearly six years and frequently going hungry while being blown off and told sexism wasn't a real problem.
You no doubt mean well. As they say, the road to hell is paved with good intentions.
Given that I appear to be the only woman to have ever spent time on the leader board, it doesn't appear to be me mishandling things. All the evidence suggests that I'm the most successful openly female member here in terms of getting accepted by the community, etc. And it has seriously sucked in a "The rampant sexism is going to help kill me" kind of way and this has been true for a great many years.
It's only in recent months that I'm beginning to get anything resembling what I wanted all along out if it. I'm quite clear this is largely due to my gender.
It's not really anything I care to discuss further. It gets me a great deal of flak to talk about all that. I've really gone to substantial pains under enormously difficult circumstance to minimize the focus on my gender and the BS I had to deal with because of it while being accused of making a big deal out of nothing, etc ad nauseum.
So I wrote a ranty personal blog post about that at some point and went through the top names on the leader board. My point was: How do I hide my identity to hide my gender and also establish a professional reputation? This doesn't work. If you know my name, you can readily infer my gender.
I posted for years under a two letter handle that can be mistaken for a feminist handle though it wasn't intended to be any such thing and I had it six weeks before it occurred to me anyone might see it that way. It was supposed to be initials from some handle I had elsewhere and I typoed it.
I had blog posts on a personal blog explaining my handle and that it wasn't a feminist handle. After I finally hit the leader board, I became extremely uncomfortable with continuing to use that handle.
I felt there were too many eyes on me and if I needed to explain it, it wasn't a good handle under which to have that kind of visibility. So I changed to my actual first and middle name.
The first week or two, I got accused of trying to pull a fast one and trick people and ridiculous stuff like that. After that settled down, HN treated me dramatically better than it ever had under my previous handle.
Obviously, there are many confounding factors and you can't definitively prove that it's any one thing. But I think if you are establishing a relationship with a community, there is no clear distinction between "I choose to behave X way because of how I expect that to impact me." and "Other people behave X way towards me." Those things create a feedback loop and you can't completely tease out how much people find them credible because they know their name and reputation, so they upvote it and how much people make an effort to say good things.
I don't think I behave differently since changing my handle, but I certainly have a much more positive experience of the forum since changing it. So that influences my feeling that other people do care about such things.