A reader writes:

I’m a woman in an industry that’s typically male-dominated. Recently I was interviewed about a project I worked on and spoke about the historic sexism in the industry and my company’s goals to be more feminist and inclusive.

Well. You’d think I said I liked to kick babies for fun. Certain sections of the internet have exploded with hate against me. My company has been flooded with threats and harassment. I’ve had to completely shut down my internet presence.

Fortunately my company has been amazing and totally standing behind me. I’ve been thinking, though, of what I’ll do when I eventually move on. I doubt there’s a company in the industry that hasn’t heard of me at this point. If I want to look for new opportunities in a year, two years, five years, how do I handle it? Not mention the incident unless they ask? Address it in the cover letter? Or wait and bring it up in the interview?

Do I warn the company that any public presence on my part might bring them unwanted attention? It’s true, but I don’t think many people want to hire a stick of dynamite.

Ugh, I’m so sorry you’re dealing with this.

Here’s how I’d look at it: Imagine if your company weren’t handling this as well as they are. You want to screen for companies like them in the future. This is going to give you a pretty clear-cut way to do that screening. A sucky, unfair, shouldn’t-have-to-even-think-about-it tool for screening, but it’s an effective tool nonetheless.

I imagine what you’re thinking is, “Yeah, but a company could be great and still not be excited about taking this battle on.” But I’m going to argue that if you’re good at what you do and have the support of your colleagues (which you do), a good company isn’t going to shy away from this in a few years. Also, a few years is a long time with this kind of thing; it will almost certainly be old news and you will be the awesome woman who, side note, had to put up with a bunch of ridiculous crap a few years back.

I don’t think you have any obligation to proactively bring this up when interviewing with future employers, unless it comes up organically and you want to talk about it. I think the fact that you’re worrying that you might need to is a sign that you’re still mired in the current trauma of what’s happening — you’re feeling like this is now something about you that of course you would have to disclose, that you are tarred by this. But it’s not something about you and you are not tarred. You did a normal and reasonable thing. It’s about other people. Their mud splattered on you, yes, but it is not a part of you.

That said, depending on how all this is feeling in a few years (and I promise you that it will feel different then than it does right now), it might bring you peace of mind to bring it up once you already have an offer. You could frame it as, “Hey, I don’t know if you already know this, but I wanted to mention that I got a bunch of criticism a few years ago from people who didn’t like an interview I gave about my company’s efforts to be more inclusive of women. It’s blown over, and my company was awesome about supporting me, but if it ever comes up in the future, I didn’t want you to be blindsided.” It’s very unlikely that a company will pull an offer over this, and the point of disclosure would only be to help you — to give you the peace of mind of knowing it’s not going to surprise them later, and to use their reaction to give you some useful data about whether you’ll enjoy working with them.