"It was just really, really tough getting anything when you were a female. Basically, I just took advantage of everything I could. But when people are going to flat out tell you they're not going to hire anyone that's female, there's not much you can do about it"
About this Quote
The blunt repetition of "really, really tough" does more than underline hardship; it recreates the grinding monotony of being denied over and over in a system that treats your ambition as a clerical error. Shannon Lucid isn’t polishing a grievance into a grand moral lesson. She’s reporting workplace physics: a force acting on a body, constant and indifferent, requiring extra fuel just to stay in the same orbit.
Her most revealing phrase is "took advantage of everything I could". In another mouth it might read as opportunism; here it lands as survival strategy. The subtext is that merit alone was never the currency. Access was the scarce resource, and she learned to hoard it: every opening, every credential, every tiny crack in the door that institutions insisted was closed. The line carries a quiet accusation, too: when marginalized people “network” or “hustle,” it’s often reframed as gaming the system, even though the system is already rigged.
Then comes the devastating clarity: "flat out tell you". No euphemisms, no plausible deniability, no HR speak. This is pre-diversity-era discrimination, spoken aloud with the confidence of impunity. The final clause - "there's not much you can do about it" - isn’t resignation so much as a diagnosis of power. It points to how discrimination functions best: not as a dramatic villainy, but as an administrative fact that forces individuals to negotiate their dreams around someone else’s certainty.
Coming from an astronaut, the irony stings. We celebrate spaceflight as peak modernity, yet her memory of the launchpad includes an old-world gatekeeping: progress engineered in metal and mathematics, stalled by a sentence as simple as "we don’t hire women."
Her most revealing phrase is "took advantage of everything I could". In another mouth it might read as opportunism; here it lands as survival strategy. The subtext is that merit alone was never the currency. Access was the scarce resource, and she learned to hoard it: every opening, every credential, every tiny crack in the door that institutions insisted was closed. The line carries a quiet accusation, too: when marginalized people “network” or “hustle,” it’s often reframed as gaming the system, even though the system is already rigged.
Then comes the devastating clarity: "flat out tell you". No euphemisms, no plausible deniability, no HR speak. This is pre-diversity-era discrimination, spoken aloud with the confidence of impunity. The final clause - "there's not much you can do about it" - isn’t resignation so much as a diagnosis of power. It points to how discrimination functions best: not as a dramatic villainy, but as an administrative fact that forces individuals to negotiate their dreams around someone else’s certainty.
Coming from an astronaut, the irony stings. We celebrate spaceflight as peak modernity, yet her memory of the launchpad includes an old-world gatekeeping: progress engineered in metal and mathematics, stalled by a sentence as simple as "we don’t hire women."
Quote Details
| Topic | Equality |
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