Feels like I'll always be seen as a diversity hire no matter what

For context, I am the sole female at a buyside shop aside from admin/operations and I am a junior person. My firm is on the smaller side, but it doesn't feel like much of an excuse when similar firms with smaller funds have a more even mix of male:women. In terms of my own background, I started my career in IB, had a short stint in corporate, then decided to recruit for buyside, so there was a bit of a pivot but I did have traditional M&A experience. I went to a target school. During the interview process, it was very clear that my firm had really wanted to hire me as they were pretty flexible in a lot of ways and seemed to just really want to make it work. I knew there was probably some degree of hiring me as a diversity hire, but I felt good about the fact that I would perform well, went to one of the best schools of anyone at my firm, and did well on my technical interview - it felt that my spot was earned.

When I first joined, I had a very strong sense of imposter syndrome. I had few responsibilities and was plastered all over fundraising materials as an incoming hire for months before I even started. This made it hard for me to feel comfortable, as while I wanted to represent women, I also had a severe fear of failure. However, I do believe I remained agile and ramped up quickly - I was trusted enough to be staffed on a majority of the major deals my firm worked on since I joined. However, I was rarely ever given feedback on things I did well/didn't do well and was certainly not allocated any time for coaching/development. A couple new hires came in after me (men of course) and I noticed a stark difference in how they were treated. I noticed that even if they flailed at certain things I could do well, they were given a lot more time but also had a lot more expectations placed on them. I started to feel as though I couldn't meet those expectations, but there was a pretty big disconnect since I knew I could perform well and off-hand people would mention that I did well in certain areas. Not only this, but there would be times when I would be asked to join a meeting just to add some credibility (e.g. speaking to a woman founder). There are also a lot of biases - people being shocked at my doing the bare minimum at times and that same person expecting more out of me than my counterparts yet spending 10% of the amount of time on my development. At this point, with the lack of time that has been spent on my development, most of what I've learned has been through my prior jobs, self-teaching, or absorbing through listening. I have a ton of doubt about my abilities and the tokenization of me weighs heavily on me. 

I recognize part of this difference in treatment may have been that my firm was focused on retaining me, so may not have wanted to put as much pressure on me/trusted that things would happen eventually, but the tokenization was never something I wanted - I wanted to be good for my level, not good for my gender. At this point, no one had even asked me what my expectations were around promotion/my goals/whether I wanted to be pushed. Finally, 2-3 months before our promotion cycle, my manager asked me. I let him know I would like to be considered for promotion, to which he told me it was too late and that the firm would want to see how I'd perform playing up before I get promoted, which, due to our promotion cycles, means that I have to play up for a year before a promotion. Part of me thinks that my firm doesn't want to promote me because it will keep me stuck/make me a less attractive candidate to other places, but part of me also thinks that my firm inherently doesn't believe in me. 

I definitely feel that I should leave before the golden handcuffs get too significant - part of me doesn't want to bite the hand that feeds me, but then I also recognize that that's me resigning to how my firm has treated me. I also don't bank on my firm to change. They have had a revolving door of women historically and I'm sure they'll look to replace me as soon as I'm gone and repeat.

But, I do think that the timing of everything makes it really hard for me - now I have to explain to recruiters why I didn't get promoted within x years, but I'm not someone who likes to talk negatively about a previous employer in interviews. What do you think I should do? Can I mention the diversity problem and expect people to understand or will they see me as a liability?