Tired of men banging the 'gender diversity' drum

Our work diversity network is infested with straight white male “allies”.

Some of them are decent men. Some of them...less so. One of them (very senior guy) gave a talk a while back where his angle was basically “I didn’t give a shit about any of this, really, until I had daughters”.

Why is that, John? Did you not really think women were people until you got to know your daughters? How did you treat women before that? How do you treat all the women that aren’t your daughters now?

He was so proud of how he was totally smashing the patriarchy by taking time off to go to his daughters school play, then sending pics round his team afterwards of what he was doing, and they all told him what a fine fellow he was for so doing (they all report into him).

I mildly asked what he thought the reaction of the team would have been if a woman in his position had done the same, and if he thought it enhanced or diminished perceptions of her commitment to work to remind people of her family responsibilities. First he didn’t understand the question. Then he got angry. Of course it would be the same! He was showing his human side! We should all be able to do that! People don’t think less of his commitment to the workplace because of his kids, why would anyone think differently of a woman?!

Clueless.

I am often surprised that we still have a Women & Equalities government department. I wonder if that will be trampled out of sight at some point.

We don't seem to be very good at getting really organised (life gets in the way) or shouting loud. We have no excuses for not shouting out loud.

I wish Politicians would do a bit of research into women to find out how we do respond. They would probably find that we quietly vote with our feet and don't tell them. They can often be caught short with their lack of understanding.

What I have noticed about the use of the concept 'diversity' is that it gives an out to anyone who doesn't want to remember that women are one half of all human beings. That's because diversity has no numerical requirements at all so it can be very unfair and unrepresentative. Sprinkle several tokens into some committee or leadership group and just treat the class 'women' exactly the same as all numerically very small minority groups!

So we get committees where 80% of the members are white heterosexual men and the remaining 20% has some men, too, but they are either black and/or gay and/or trans. Women, whatever our sexuality or race, tend to have to fight for places in that 20%.

I made the numbers up for that example. But it is really very common to have diversity praised in cases where women, overall, are a small minority. So diversity is not the same thing as fairness or being representative of overall population shares.

Many of the male activists in this field actually have no skin in the game. They will be safe whatever happens as trans men won't take their sports victories or leadership roles and won't sexually harass them in toilets. And they can participate in the colonisation of the female sex without being told off for being colonialists.

You’re right, Diversity is a big ole capitalist industry. Our diversity head is a white gay man with he/him pronouns. 🙄
Good news though-I recently went on a diversity course and the Keira Bell case came up and people were horrified. People had heard about it and seen it on TV.

I knew my post would get deleted. Totally worth it.

Am with you, op. And the whole Karen thing is just another misogynistic, ageist insult to shut up women who dare to be assertive.

It's the patriarchy fights back, isn't it. Where overwhelmingly white, affluent males lecture women on how we need to genuflect to them on what it is to be a woman, and marginalised. It's like some have suddenly realised they have the perfect checkmate, freeing them from all that tiresome having to pretend to see us as equals.

Only a man could have the breathtaking effrontery to lecture a woman on what a woman is, and how it feels to be one.

The original perfectly good reasons for it are all lost in a tidal wave of whining white men

The whole diversity business is largely idiotic IMO. What does it even mean? It doesn't seem to mean any kind of diversity of thought, that's for sure. And there are people who think, for example, small places with pretty homogeneous populations are not diverse enough to be really good places - I've heard people, in all seriousness, say they wouldn't want to live in a place like that as their kids wouldn't be exposed to enough diversity.

Diversity seems to be the barometer for goodness but it's not really up o the challenge.

Is it a girl's arse that he's talking out of?

Asking for a friend.

Sam Smith apparently has "girl breasts and girl thighs'. Where the rest of the girl is, no one seems to know.
It means nothing, none of it means anything.

... being told by those with penises how hard they have it (no pun intended).

(It's still hilarious!)

More importantly, I agree with your whole post.

No you're absolutely right OP. It's quite stark.

I agree OP.
We had "diversity training" in my last job. We were looking forward to it. When we got there it was a trans woman talking about themselves, and their sex life. If I remember rightly every attendee was female and being bolshy and mostly Northern it was made very clear in the feedback forms that we were not impressed and would like some proper training please, that it was rather offensive to think we needed this, and that we thought we should, for a number of reasons, have been told in advance what the training was going to consist of. Never heard any feedback on the feedback. Don't know how it would go down today.
I do work with lots of different cultures and I am playing catch up a lot of the time. Training on Romanian/ Roma culture and for example would be a lot more useful.