Part of the issue at hand is that the current work culture is centered around purely masculine principles, I think someone wrote you have to go into a conversation like that and close the sale. Yes, that’s the case, but what if someone actually had empathy, tried to understand what it meant for you to incur all of those extra expenses on a much lower salary, face audience disapproval, work longer hours — what if that were actually acknowledged and you weren’t made to feel like you were playing the victim because you were talking about the realities of the double standard? And then, of course, what you learned is that we teach people how to treat us and that no is a complete sentence, both of those things..