Do you want to know why I am so angry?
I’m angry because a few years ago, I missed out on a much-wanted and much-deserved promotion. Not because the successful candidate was more experienced or innovative or committed than me. No, it was because he was a man.
Because he was young, malleable and marketable, and because he was not a difficult woman - like me. Or so I was judged to be. And that makes me angry.
I’m angry because I then had to call out this poor behaviour and endure a lengthy process through the anti-discrimination tribunal, one designed to fob me off and wear me down so I would just give up. That ultimately confirmed that men in power could declare their processes were better than most, leaving them ultimately unanswerable to their decisions.
I’m angry because their response to changing workplace culture was only actioned through a pathetic, twenty-minute online module that was a tokenistic, superficial - and one clearly and hastily constructed in order to tick a box - introduction to workplace equality.
I am angry because people who knew discriminatory questions had been asked in interviews were happy to laugh and talk about it afterwards, but when it came to the crunch of telling the truth in a tribunal they declared they ‘could not recall’ the conversations and refused to speak up.
I am especially angry because that ‘party line’ emerged from a toxic, behind-closed-doors office space of men who have power. They know it and they use it. To fuel their own egos and belittle others. It was that same space that created the false narrative of difficult women in the first place, led by one vile and vindictive individual.
I am also angry to see people in positions of leadership who are lazy and ineffectual, who have no promised ‘vision for the role’ but have the job because they were tapped on the shoulder and urged to apply. Because the boys' club was jostling into positions.
I am angry to see people - men - in positions of senior leadership who come late to work and leave early to drop off or pick up their kids from school. Why am I angry about that? Because for years, I left home early and suffered the stress of managing the fine line between dropping one child off not too early at school but not too late so that I would be late for work, and then dropping a second at child care before I made it to work. On time but harried before my day had even begun. Because I did not want to be judged at work for being late. For having my kindergarten child catch a bus from her school to mine because I did not have the luxury - or the audacity - of leaving early to pick her up.
For being told in a previously unsuccessful application for a leadership position that perhaps when my family circumstances were different - that is, when my children were older and I had fewer maternal responsibilities - I might reapply. For hearing other women in my workplace being told they were not suitable for leadership roles because their family situations might inhibit their ability to do the job.
I am bloody angry that I have heard men denigrate women in my workplace and other men have laughed and joined in and not had the guts or the insight to call it out.
I am furious this year because I have been encouraged to ‘show what I can do’ in a program I am running because I was angry and upset that I missed out on another - because a man, in leadership, ‘wanted it.’ And so he got it. Even though it was my initiative and my push to sell it. I am really angry that I have to work harder than others to prove myself. Still, after all these years.
And all this for what? Because I know that when that position comes up again, I won’t get it - no matter what experience, commitment, innovation and collaboration I demonstrate. No, I won’t get it because a leader’s male ego will be injured if he admits he made the wrong decision, and so the same lazy leader will be reappointed.
And so I will remain angry, and disappointed, and hurt. But I will not give up. I know my worth, even if 'some men' don't. Even if ‘some women’ are unwilling to stand up for other women out of their own sense of fear or threat.
Oh, and one more thing … I’m angry that I can’t share this story publicly because I know I will be quietly punished for doing so. (But I am doing it anyway)
I too know that evil thrives in silence, Grace Tame.
