Some of the recent starred conversations on the right have made me reconsider whether I should attempt to engage with this chat. I was somewhat shocked at the people in what had appeared to be enviable positions who also feel vulnerable, so here's me being temporarily empowered to share my experience. For it's worth, in response to something else upthread, I'm not a woman either.
I am not a homotopy theorist, but homotopy-adjacent, and have had a longstanding interest, ever since my last year of grad school ... which my interactions with the community have gone some way toward suppressing.