Ten years ago, I attempted to hire a male secretary and accounts department aid. It is rarely talked about in feminist outrage circles, but entry-level office roles are almost exclusively filled by women – young women, older women, new mothers, and those fresh out of collage with three or four pointless degrees.
Welcoming clients, performing random tasks associated with the office, filing paperwork, running around the city streets on errands, or – heaven forbid! – making a cup of tea is an industry lacking gender equality.
I have never heard anyone shout, ‘Where are the men!’ or demand programs to fire women and replace them, but when the time came to hire a new secretary, I really wanted a man.
My staff were wonderful. Every time the higher-ups in marketing or sales (all men) made a catastrophic error and ran away to a corporate lunch like a puppy evading its pee, my girls were the ones who got straight onto the phone and cleaned it up. You have no idea the nightmares they had to fix or the lack of gratitude they received from those responsible for the mess.
There was, however, one part of the job where being petite and female held a disadvantage – lifting the sales record files off the top shelf. These documents were stored in large plastic boxes and were only accessible by ladder. Day after day, I watched tiny women (and they really were small), climbing up ladders in heels and maneuvering boxes that probably weighed as much as they did.
Sometimes we were able to guilt a marketing boy into retrieving the boxes, usually after saving their skin, but it was a poor solution to what seemed like an inevitable disaster.
Our department needed a man, preferably a tall one.
When one of my girls fell pregnant and said her goodbyes, we hatched a scheme to hire a bloke. Boy, did we try. For months. I am telling you from experience, there are gender-splits in the workforce that exist because of free choice, not some evil patriarchy. Blokes don’t want to work as secretaries and women don’t want to drill for oil.
Is it possible to find a handful of outlying personalities who buck this trend? Of course, but not enough to obey artificial ‘diversity’ commands like those being floated by the Prime Minister.
Albanese’s insulting and, frankly, sexist new gender law is an affront to modern society.
Equality of opportunity does not mean inviting the strong arm of government to reach into private business and dictate the appearance of the workforce based on identity instead of skill. It is insulting for Labor to suggest it, although we know why Labor obsesses about race, gender, and sexual orientation. A core value of the modern Left is that they are the liberators of former oppression. ‘Liberation’ looks a certain way, for example, a 50-50 split across all the well-paid and pretty jobs. (Labor never mentions forcing women to be garbage collectors because it doesn’t look good on the campaign poster.)
If, when human beings are free to work where they want, gender division persists or increases, that means the Labor Party weren’t liberating anyone from anything. Their movement might even be irrelevant. Robbed of their saviour status, what does the Labor Party have left? A good economic record? Great national security? Social cohesion? Yeah…
Before Albanese gets himself kicked out of office, he seems determined to ruin the business world with his gender equality targets which are on the agenda for the first week of Parliament.
In short, businesses with 500 employees or more will be forced to pick three Woke-style targets, one of which is the gender makeup of the workforce. No word on whether Albanese will allow men who identify as women to be counted as women.
If employers do not succeed in these targets within three years, well, the government will publicly name and shame them before cutting off access to lucrative grants.
Long gone are the days when businesses were rewarded for treating every human being as an equal and rewarding them for their merit. Albanese wants to see businesses pin little gold stars on themselves for hiring women, that is, despite the Labor Party refusing to correctly define women or protect women’s spaces.
It is very much a ‘we care about women when it is politically convenient’ or, ‘women are useful tools in our election agenda’.
I really want to know if Albanese has the balls to deny grant money to a garbage collection service for having more blokes than sheilas. Please, someone, ask him that question on air. Let’s see him defend this nonsense when the jobs get messy.
As for our office girls, I had the files quietly moved to an offsite storeroom where they were kept on the ground. Then I made sure all future paperwork was digitised. In the absence of men, the work was changed so it could be done by women. The catch? The programing that made it possible was created by men. In case you haven’t caught on, work is not a gender war – it is a business trying to provide a lucrative service that overcomes challenges in the most sensible, not ideological, manner.
