Can I make you angry?
When your friend knows exactly what will push you over the edge
Here come the girls
What a flurry of attention it has been for women and mothers recently. International Women’s Day, Mother’s Day, the Irish referendum. My synopsis of the last few weeks would be seeing a lot of complaints about a lack of meaningful change on IWD, sensitive and thoughtful messages for those who might find Mother’s Day a struggle and a huge sense of relief at the results of the referendum.
The algorithms mean that I’m surrounded by like-minded people online and I mostly, thankfully, see women supporting other women. My Instagram feed is mostly orientated around birth, breastfeeding and suggested ways to get my children to eat or sleep (although there are a lot of kitchen and underfloor heating ads creeping in). Facebook is all about the groups - sewing groups that encourage me to keep buying fabric and convincing myself that one day I really could make a dress for myself too. I have mostly managed to wean myself off X, but when I dip back in, I’m thrown straight back into the fight for women’s rights. My LinkedIn feed is full of focus on pay gaps, DEI and female founders (thanks to the incredible Awaken Hub).
Safe in my bubble
I know that I am in a social media bubble that I have created with my own clicks and likes. I only have to accidentally pick up my husband’s phone to be instantly transported to videos about food, speculation on football and gaming groups. Even though I know we’ve all got our own worlds going on in our phones, it’s still a shock to stumble into a whole different school of thought.
This week my friend sent me a message that read “Can I make you angry?”. Imagine my impatience at seeing that tease of a message appear that I couldn’t click into for another two hours while I sat through work meetings. In that time, I had imagined that the text was going to be about a juicy bit of work politics, or that someone I know had been badly wronged and I could be relied on to provide an outraged response. I hadn’t expected to be faced with screenshots of comments from people that were clearly living in a very different bubble to me.
Going too far
An article in the FT titled “Has the push for female equality gone too far?” brought out several jaw-dropping comments from people who are seemingly able to afford an FT subscription. Whilst the article itself revealed that the journalist had spent no time in understanding why the proposals in the Irish referendum were rejected, it did have a link in it to this fascinating survey. The survey proved that my carefully curated social media feeds are not representative of what people outside of my bubble think. 56% of men in Great Britain and 48% of men in Ireland now think that when it comes to giving women equal rights with men, things have gone too far in their country.
Mostly I feel confused when I read those statistics. It’s clear that like the FT journalist, I need to do more research about why people would feel that way.
Onto the anger
Setting aside the confusion, the rumblings of anger weren’t far away. Here’s a selection of the comments beneath the article that my friend rightly assumed would set the flames of rage burning.
“Young men must despair and rightly revolt at what their future prospects must seem like”
“How much more equal can they be? Seriously, what is left? The gender pay gap is a myth”
“You can’t ignore that men and women often gravitate towards different careers because we are generally wired differently”
“In my job women are in the majority. And they control their hours and work life balance meticulously. The men remaining do tend to do a little more work.”
After spending the week researching diversity in the FTSE 350 and my industry, I just can’t relate to these comments. I’ve seen lots of debate about whether it’s realistic to have a target of an equal male to female ratio in senior leadership given that projections show we won’t get there in the near future. Whilst I can try to set aside my own opinions and enter that debate with a data-based approach, these comments reveal that some people really do hold beliefs that I simply cannot understand. This isn’t an invisible patriarchy. Some people really do believe that women aren’t capable of running businesses, shouldn’t have an equal seat at the table and can’t grasp that those meticulous time-keeping skills are evidence of a woman spinning all her plates.
I don’t have the answers. I’d like to offer a way forward and find some hope for the future. I’m not sure what that looks like and I’m clearly not the right person to speak to the Gen Z men who were heavily swaying the survey results. I don’t think data or passion from me is going to hit the mark.
So what shall we do about the poor men facing a life of unwanted equality? Maybe they should join some of my sewing groups and see if a bit of creativity lifts their attitude.
I totally agree, the shock when you're exposed to some of the unbelievably outdated ways of thinking outside of our well-curated bubbles, is like the ice bucket challenge every time.
I try to follow some accounts that are either just outside or report on the opinions outside the bubble just so I stay grounded on what we're actually working against!