It’s time to speed it up cause I can’t move at this pace.

Workplace consultancy firm The Dream Collective have found that 48% of white collar professional men surveyed feel fatigued by the notion of gender equality. 52% feel that women are favoured for jobs and promotions on the basis of their gender. I just, like, paused for 7 minutes because I can’t even begin to process how irate this makes me. I’m aware that I’m not a white collar professional, I have a quite nice blue collar, but I work in one of the most testosterone fuelled dick swinging environments outside of the NRL, and I’m fucking fatigued, too. 

 

I’m tired of derivative gender diversity initiatives aimed at improving women. Women make up 25% of the organisation I belong to and 10% of the trade I belong to. It doesn’t matter how brilliant we are, and let’s be real, we are fucking brilliant, we cannot continue to be the only demographic responsible for driving culture change. We can’t mentor women out of this problem, because, and this bit is important – women are not the problem. To suggest we’re overlooked for opportunities because we’re not quite good enough while mediocre men benefit from affinity bias on a daily basis is beyond insulting. As much as it pains my cold feminist heart to say it, we need men. We need allies. We need co-conspirators. We need men of influence who “get it” to pull their knuckle dragging, shell backed peers who live relentlessly in the past, into the present.

 

I’m tired of having my lived experience dismissed. It’s next level gaslighting for a 22 year old dude with 2 minutes experience to tell me that “things should just be equal, this is just reverse sexism.” There is no more eye-roll inducing term than “reverse sexism/racism.” To suggest that women could cause harm to men that is comparable to the harm men cause women is laughable. If someone says things like ‘reverse sexism,’ they’re already well on the path to misogyny. I’m tired of a world in which a mediocre white guy who says he wants to “hate fuck” a subordinate is promoted, moved to a new location, only to put another junior woman through a similar trauma within 2 years. This shit is exhausting.

 

I’m tired of women’s successes being attributed to their gender, when a vast majority of the time, their successes are in spite of their gender. And the fact that this is supposed to be a sad indictment on the women rather than the straight old white dudes who make the important decisions? What the actual fuck?

 

To the 48 & 52%, me too, bro. Me too. I’m tired of there being a need for derivative gender diversity initiatives. Until male entitlement stops rewarding mediocrity, get some fucking rest.