I am grateful every single day that I have two children, my son and my daughter. One thing that has elevated in my priorities, is what challenges they will both face growing up and entering the working world. The challenges are very different.
Relentless fear and bias
For my daughter, there are obvious issues she will face. My wife has always articulated what women have to generally put up with in the workplace, going out and in any given social situation – those biases, the sexualisation, the unfair presumptions. I can see these moments now quite clearly and quite regularly. It’s unrelenting.
When my wife was pregnant with my son she was sidelined almost immediately, and when she was later interviewed for a role post-birth, she was asked how she would prioritise and cope with work-life when she has a family to look after. In the 90’s she was asked by a manager to ‘take one for the team’ – basically ‘sleep with the ‘busy hands’ client’. Post #metoo it’s obvious this is the world as we know it.
Another famous saying is ‘men fear women laughing at them, women fear men killing them’. Far from being isolated incidents, violence against women and girls is commonplace. Despite this being a ‘hidden crime’, it’s estimated 2 in 3 women between the ages of 16 and 34 in Great Britain have been subjected to at least one form of harassment. There are peaks in the violence against women after football games and also when women attempt to leave their partners.
It recently came to light that a good friend of ours was nearly beaten to death by her husband, leaving her with broken ribs, and nearly choked to death. She showed us the pictures she took and I was horrified. The husband was such a charmer but it looked like she had been hit by a bus. He’s still with her, and that is hard to understand from a distance but then he’s woven into the fabric of her life completely and the process of leaving is challenging, legally hard and mentally exhausting. In a Facebook group recently I was witness to a sequence of events which highlighted the thin line women have to walk. A guy goes for a swim with a woman in the group (for safety in numbers) and the following night he texts her saying he is up for an affair with her or if not her, her friend and he ‘knows the rules’. She was married and didn’t want any of it. Her crime, smiling, joking and being nice to him. And since then, people are still saying – ‘maybe she led him on’. She didn’t.
Beyond all this, there is a general gender gap in pay and position. For clarity, the official stats say among full-time employees the gender pay gap in April 2022 was 8.3% in the UK. It’s a problem that a woman can be in the exact same job as a man and earn considerably less, with no justification. So, I get it. There is a disadvantage right there at the start and it’s critical to fight for equality, standards and being safe, for my daughter’s future.
Broken before being made
For my son, there are issues too. Something that keeps me awake at night is the suicide statistics, especially for men. It’s like something is broken. In 2019 the suicide rate for men was three times higher than women and it is incredibly, a main cause of death amongst young men. It’s not just the successful attempts though. Every secondary school these days has someone who has attempted it or thought about it. Depression, low self-esteem, anxiety, lack of direction and aspiration, and of course stress, are rife – now amplified by a sense of general doom and gloom about the future with climate change and an impossible economic environment to buy houses and even get jobs.
For boys and men, I have a sense of something that has changed since my childhood days. Social groups are predominantly virtual, senses are numbed, and friendships are simplified. The sense of being a man, in my labelled ‘privileged’ demographic, has eroded too in some ways. A lot of language is now derogatory of men or a label of condemnation, such as ‘mansplaining’, ‘middle-aged white male’ (as an example of the wrong kind of male)’, and ‘man-baby’. Lots of slights permeate into culture, perhaps in a backlash, but what my son feels and hears growing up, about his place in society is important to me. I’ve seen a lot of anger towards men in general, as a gender (and yes, I do get the relation to this with my previous points about gender equality). For the first time in my life, I’ve experienced a small nudge from the other foot, a kind of shame associated with simply being what I am (a white male), not who I am. I don’t want that to develop for young men in this position and why would I?
My stance is, and always has been, to accept everybody, until or unless they prove unacceptable, through character or through behaviour. I need to teach that to my children and teach them to know that they are so much more than what people might see in them from preconceptions, or through the filtered lens of a bias.
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