KATE EMERY: Jobs for girls: Merit is a huge disruptor to the manosphere

Big social change looks best in the rear-view mirror. The further away from things you get, the better they look. Like a Monet. Or most people. Living through social upheaval? Ugh, it’s the worst. From the comfy vantage point of 2024 all major social change in Australia’s past can become a palatable montage. (White) women getting the vote? Let’s get protestors with placards, a quick shot of a suffragette chucking a brick through a window, then a close-up of a woman happily casting her vote for, I don’t know, let’s say Alfred Deakin. Marriage equality? Show us some B-roll from Pride parades, no more than one second of a hate crime, then cut to Penny Wong shedding a tear at the referendum results. I could go on but should probably get to my point instead, which is this: what the hell is going on at Rio Tinto? Or, to put it another way: are men OK? To answer the second part first: some men are not OK. To answer the first part second: what’s happening at Rio is happening at a lot of places. Rio’s just the poor bugger with its arse hanging out. The story so far: this week Rio released the results of its latest workplace culture review, which showed bullying and sexism was still a big issue. The biggest shock is that Rio made it public, rather than sealing it in a concrete tomb like radioactive waste or Kevin Rudd’s old Donald Trump tweets. But the parts of the report getting the most attention are those comments from male employees who feel they’re experiencing “reverse sexism”. “As a white heterosexual male, I feel as though my thoughts and feelings aren’t worth expressing any more,” one man said. Said another: “As a male, you feel like you are a perpetrator when you have got nothing to do with it. It is an implied guilty by chromosome.” And finally: “I just feel absolutely bloody worthless. If I apply for a job with 30 years of experience, but there is a lady there who is fresh, they will take her. I apply for a supervisor role. I have done all this training. There’s a chick that is only a couple of years experienced over me. How do you compare 30 years in mining over a chick with a couple of years?” It’s easy to go to suggest that, if your 30 years of experience can be bettered by a newbie “chick”, maybe the problem isn’t what you’ve got between your legs but between your ears. But a flip response ignores that the backlash to the push for greater diversity in Corporate Australia is real. As is a broader backlash to #MeToo — a social movement that exposed abusers and put a spotlight on rape culture but which has also left some men with the idea they’ll be castrated on the spot if they open a door for a woman. The belief among some men that feminism and the “woke left” have gone too far has helped drive the rise of the online manosphere and the return of Trump to power, for better or worse (let’s be real — it’s probably for worse). UK author Caitlin Moran was onto something in her book What About Men when she identified that, while women’s lives have fundamentally changed in the past 100 years, thanks to feminism, men’s haven’t. Some men feel ripped off that there’s not been a global social movement championing their rights and telling young boys they’re great The backlash shouldn’t be a surprise. Not many people with power give it up willingly. Being a white, straight man shouldn’t be a disadvantage in the workplace but it shouldn’t be an advantage either and, for a long time, it has been. The inevitable rebalancing was always going to be painful for those who stand to lose their privilege — more so if they never even realised they had it. The shock of realising it’s never been a meritocracy is real. Some men clearly think women are taking their jobs. Those jobs were never “men’s jobs”. They were just . . . jobs. But this is the reality of living through big social change. It’s hard and confusing and some benefit and others lose. Go too fast and people feel left behind. Go too slowly and bugger all changes. And a hundred years from now Australians not yet born will look back on this period of history and see it as a pretty little montage and a paragraph in a history book.