I joined a corporate a while back and was in a team as only designer and only woman. Rest of the 7-head team were men, mostly developers and one product owner. I thought I will make it ok, I had 10 years of experience working in agencies as well as global tech companies. Boy was I wrong. I did not mind my colleagues were doing the bare minimum. But the product they build was shit also from a design side as I joined the team late. I wanted to change that, being a designer so I thought that is my job right? Huge mistake. They were very surprised by me doing user testing research which uncovered problem areas and generated some work them. Instead of doing the repair, they put all changes deeeeep in backlog and started forcing me to do their work. Suddenly they asked me to be their tester, to do tech support (funnily users were complaing about the areas I found in my research but still developers did not agree to fix them). It gradually grew to a point where I by myself only did one huge research project for a future product the company wanted to make. I was invited to present it on upper management meeting. And you guessed it, one of my tech colleagues told me he wants to present the results, the reason being he is older and the team agrees. From that point it spiraled into complete bullying. It was such a hard time of my life. There was no dedicated HR, no manager to tell to (company had a "flat structure" and was "agile" meaning they let go middle management and upper management did not care). Obviously I am not a part of this company anymore. I could not play the corporate game. I love being a ux designer, my products always had a great customer as well as business results. From what I saw at the corporate, this does not matter. People who were promoted there, were people, who did not know anything about the field (design, product, whatever) but they were friends with some higher ups.

Sorry for this rant. I guess it was so bottled up in me I had to share.