At each office I joined in my twenties, I was offered a set of survival tips by older women. Go to the pub with the team if you want to get on; don’t go to the pub if you don’t want to get touched up at the bar by Boss 1. Don’t wear heels around Boss 2, or he’ll never take you seriously. Do wear heels around Boss 3, or he’ll relegate you to the back room.
Never mention a boyfriend around Boss 4, or he’ll think you’re one step away from maternity leave and he’ll take you off management track. Make sure to mention a boyfriend around Boss 5 – invent one if you must – or you’ll be the latest girl to find herself receiving unsolicited love letters in the internal mail from a florid baby boomer. In that particular job, each girl who received these successive declarations of “devotion” has now quit the industry.
Young women entering the workplace are still initiated by their elders as if facing a high-wire assault course. Yet in the eight years since the #MeToo movement called some of this out, the nation’s white men have complained with increasing regularity that they too feel awkward and uncomfortable when dealing with the opposite sex at work – or with colleagues of a different race.
A new YouTube and podcast series, launched this week with the emotive title White Men Can’t Work!, promises to speak for the 46 per cent of men who now censor jokes in the workplace, or the 41 per cent who suffer anxiety that “as a white man” they could be sacked over “doing or saying the wrong thing”. That’s according to polling commissioned for the series.
Read some of the coverage of that polling – splashed all over the right-wing press – and you’ll learn that the workplace is now a minefield for young white men. It suggests that 36 per cent of white men aged between 18 and 34 believe that they have lost out on professional opportunities because of their identity. It’s a terrible thing to lose an opportunity because of the body into which you were born. I’ll remember that next time I run into the academic who told me that if I wanted to work in universities, I should get a breast reduction.
Welcome boys, and join the club! For as long as women have been in the labour force – as long as there has been labour – women have had to negotiate male pride, male prejudice and male priapism.
That is not to suggest that two wrongs make a right, or that the growing anxieties of young men – including anxieties whipped up by YouTube series, and amplified by newspapers that should know better – should simply be ignored. But it should make us wonder why men are now finding this all so hard to handle.
Five years since the murder of George Floyd, and the mushrooming expansion of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement, it is clear that many workplaces rushed to pay lip service to a new left-wing orthodoxy. Yet the same global corporations rushed to abolish their DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) programmes within days of the election of Donald Trump, which demonstrates just how superficial that commitment was.
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Walmart, the world’s largest retailer, responded to the BLM moment by making a five-year commitment to a centre for racial equality. This November, immediately following Trump’s election, it announced that commitment will not continue. It simultaneously stopped participating in a programme for measuring workplace inclusion for LGBTQ+ employees.
The people behind White Men Can’t Work! had pollsters JL Partners interview 823 white men to come up with their stats. Their press bonanza makes no mention of similar surveys polling much larger numbers of women.
Of 3,977 young women recently canvassed by the Young Women’s Trust (YWT), 53 per cent felt they had experienced discrimination at work, with numbers higher for non-white women. The YWT didn’t just take these women’s word for it. Nearly one third of HR managers interviewed said they had witnessed precisely such discrimination in hiring positions.
Look at a survey on a much larger scale and the picture gets more depressing. Last year’s McKinsey Women In the Workplace Survey spoke to 15,000 people about their careers; over the last decade it has surveyed 480,000 people about their workplaces. Even if the current rates of increased participation are sustained, they project that it will take 22 years for white women to achieve gender parity with white men in the workplace, and 48 years for women of colour.
No one deserves to be discriminated against in the workplace – not women, not people of colour, not white men. And yes, anti-white male discrimination does happen – it is true that cultural institutions have recently been particularly eager to appoint non-white, non-male leaders.
Yet every commercial industry remains overwhelmingly led by white men. If young white men feel the odds are stacked against them, we should be asking who is feeding them this lie.
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