Holding fast to goodness

Originally, I did not intend to follow up on my last message, but I want to share a few additional thoughts. While I still see the positive impact my work has had, I am deeply disappointed by what happened personally, and part of me wishes I had never published it. At the same time, I know this experience will resonate with many others who encounter similar situations. If this story feels familiar, please know that you are not alone. These are not isolated incidents, but reflect systemic problems that others before me have already written about (for example, see here, here, or here).

To make it clear upfront: while I know my work has resonated globally and that many others have built on it (and likely profited from it), I have earned nothing from my own work. I have received zero requests for genuine collaboration and, beyond not benefiting from it, I have also had to deal with stalkers and at times even felt uncomfortable leaving my own apartment.

When I entered the social impact world after academia, I knew that this sector, too, often operates within exploitative dynamics. At the time, however, I felt a strong need to turn the traumatic experiences I had into something good that could help others. And I know I did, both according to my own standards and based on the feedback I received from those I worked with. If the only challenge had been the underpayment that is common in these fields, I could have lived with that.

Looking back now, however, the past years were not so different from academia. While I have met many genuinely kind, brilliant people who truly want to build a better world for everyone, I personally received very little support over the years. (I will always be grateful to the people who did support me; it meant the world to me.) At the same time, I also experienced a considerable amount of targeted and harmful behavior.

Almost always, this behavior followed the same pattern: devaluing me, sometimes publicly, while simultaneously copying me and/or presenting my work as their own without fair credit. Psychologically, this is a well-known behavioral pattern, and in almost all cases where it happened to me, I know I was not the only one affected. To this day, none of those who actively harmed me have taken accountability for their actions or offered an apology. To my knowledge, there have also never been consequences. The only outcome has been that victims, and those who refused to be bystanders to these dynamics, eventually left the respective organizations.

I know that being a young-ish woman who has always approached a competitive “game” cooperatively (think prisoner’s dilemma) has contributed to this. I am also aware that this is a systemic problem across sectors and fields, one that disproportionately affects people from underrepresented groups. As a former techie, the situation involving Timnit Gebru at Google immediately comes to mind.

To me, the saddest part about my experiences over the past decade is that none of this was an accident or a “force of nature.” It was always human behavior. Despite this, I still want to do good for others, because passing on the harm that was done to me would only continue this destructive pattern. That was never an option for me and never will be.

People often use their experiences of running a marathon to write about perseverance, discipline, or the idea that hard work will pay off in the end. My main lesson from running a marathon was how easy it felt compared to most of what I have faced over the last ten years. There was no pain and no discomfort aside from the heat. Most importantly, there was no one intentionally trying to trip you so that you would fall.

Instead, professional runners share the course with amateurs. People of all ages, genders, and cultures run side by side. The sidelines are filled with supportive volunteers and spectators cheering for strangers they have never met. Plus, everyone who crosses the finish line before the cutoff time earns a medal, regardless of their pace.

This is the kind of space that gives people energy rather than draining it. And if I am being completely honest, after many years of navigating environments where obstacles were too often placed in my path, I no longer have the energy to keep jumping over them just to make it to the finish line.

What I hope for, instead, are spaces that feel more like long-distance running events, where people run alongside one another, lift each other up, and cross the finish line together instead of pushing others down.