The Vagenda - when feminist office politics backfires and discriminates against men

Men are more likely to be victims of sex discrimination these days

I have worked in various job roles over the last thirty plus years since leaving school, these have included front-line Policing, manufacturing industry, service industry and both private and government corporations.

The thing I observed where the most female conflicts were, were not with workplace interactions with females and males, but between females, vadge on vadge conflict, to put it bluntly.

Until I started working with my last company just over a year or so back, I had never experienced any problems in workplace relations with female colleagues. And I think that is a good reflection on the workplace, because this ensures that people are focused on work and the health of the company through productivity and profitability, rather than conduction of either covert or overt internecine warfare.

In policing, I worked with a number of women from different ranks from the officer on the beat to senior officer level staff, even having women as supervising officers and without any problems or issues.

This was an environment where unexpected external events might shape your working day, so the policing arena provided a massive range of potential work occurrences and situations that might present themselves, from a vulnerable missing person to an armed robbery as examples.

The office environment in civilian life was a jungle of a different type to the concrete jungle I had worked in during my policing career. As someone with experience of investigation, observation and information gathering, I was ideally placed to watch and learn.

The only times when there was any obvious agenda is when a business was realigning itself and looking for excuses to try and push staff out by certain behaviour patterns, I only had this previously once a long time ago when I was employed under false pretences, to build (actually it was to rebuild) the marketing arm of a company where the previous contender had left I was told.

What I wasn't told was that the person had only gone on maternity leave and the company was hedging on someone getting the marketing effort turned around and driving sales up which I did.

However, the management then decided because things were going well, to bring this person back into the company part time, 3 days a week and probably for less pro-rata  pay and they decided to make me redundant.

That was their problem and the business did not prosper after I left. In fact, I think that arm of the business I was in is no longer.

My most recent experience of discrimination was when I was working in sales. I worked in an office with a majority of women staff, with no problem whatsoever. My (female) sales colleague although part time, had children still at school. We had a good working relationship and the sales turnover doubled in the time I was with the company. So do the math as they say.

However, a female director came back into the business having disposed of outside directorial commitments with external business interests. She then decided without any evidence of such experience, to take over the sales and marketing management of the company.

I had over twenty years of experience in sales, marketing and graphic design and would have been the ideal person to have taken on that role. That aside, it was immediately apparent that this director was just wildly thrashing about in the shallows to meet objectives, creating a lot of froth and discord but not much else.

Essentially for one example, I advised the director on a marketing visual that was to be sent out to prospects and customers as a proof had been sent around the office.

To be frank, as someone who has worked in print design, it was a disaster, the fonts were too small, didn't work in the colours chosen, the card chosen was for 'ethical' reasons and the colour used on a banner looked insipid. So I carefully advised on what I thought should be done to fix that. Looking back, this was obviously the start of my expertise being seen as a perceived threat.

About a month later, I heard this director in an unguarded moment say that she wanted 'an all girl office.' As I don't have a vagina, that did put me at something of a disadvantage. And you could see how this was going.

As part of my marketing activities, I used to send out communications to my target business sectors usually as letters with additional materials depending on the objective.

One day I was given a tranche of letters to sign to be sent out and I just happened to notice after the first couple that this wasn't my usual letter. So I asked the Admin assistant had there been a mistake in the letter printed? No, I was informed, she had been given it to print by this director, who had rewritten it.

This rang alarm bells immediately, for the simple reason that the carefully structured communication I had used successfully, was now nonsensical to the degree that the use of exclamation marks to reinforce statements, which were completely out of place with the message and not appropriate for the senior level contacts I was sending to.

The fact that this had been done without consultation was bad enough, but the end product devalued the profile of the company let alone create awareness of products I was trying to target my sectors with, which had been deleted from my letter.

The director, refusing it seems to use my skills and experience, engaged a female friend of hers to advise on marketing! A person, who had not any experience of their business, to which I had experience of their customer base, target audience, products and ideas of where to develop business for around a year. So this female director paid someone to reinvent the wheel.

The best was yet to come though, in a meeting with this female director, I was criticised for not taking all my holiday earlier in the year, I worked in a small office where at least half or more of the staff had school age children and my observation and feeling was that they should have priority for school holiday time leave because of these commitments for the obvious reasons. And I had no family commitments.

(The company had recently changed to another supplier of product and there was a range of product available that was obvious to fill a market sector that they were failing to secure business in due to cost.

Having analysed the typical customer spend and the type of customer, it was blindingly obvious to take this product base on and increase sales to another revenue stream, but oh no, I was told that would devalue their brand and they wanted to concentrate on high-end customers, which if this director had bothered to look at the sales analysis were responsible for relatively few sales per head in each week.)

But that seemed to cut no ice with this director and she went to try and throw stones with accusations that I didn't really want to be there and I should make up my mind what to do, i.e. she was wanting me to leave and making the meeting and her feelings more and more unpleasant by the minute, so with all that had gone on I decided to resign. Any person I relate this experience to is appalled by how I was treated.

Some have said why didn't you take a case against the company? The simple answer is that the swing door of sexism doesn't swing in my favour as a man usually.

But this isn't the end of the spiteful behaviour, when I signed on, the director who was also in charge of human remains chose to sit on a letter from the DWP for 6 weeks before responding to it, which was asking her to confirm why I had left their company. I stated to the DWP that I had been forced into resigning. This director stated allegedly that I had been made redundant. I saw this for myself on the DWP computer.

Not only that but the director chose to sit on my P45 which she had all the details for processing my tax affairs with, some six weeks earlier for a further six weeks plus after I had left. This is hardly what I would call adult behaviour or behaviour that is acceptable from a company director. And as I had done nothing wrong and helped the company double its turnover in a year, I fail to understand where this person is coming from or their anger?

This director clearly has issues and it makes no difference what the gender is, the behaviour clearly is not what I would call professional, from someone with an Oxbridge degree.

This sort of behaviour sets the equality arguments back. With equality, surely people should be working together constructively in their companies to go forward, not surely fighting like children in a playground?

Anyway, thankfully I am well rid of this director and I have not contacted anyone at the company since leaving, I have chosen to move on and find somewhere else to work, however I was refused two interviews recently one was because the female employer was looking for a young woman under 25 or a gay man ideally and the other job where the reason given was that 'they wanted another female to balance their office,' i.e. they wanted another female in their office not a bloke.

It doesn't bother me, if they have that mindset and employ on a pudenda agenda, then they will stand the chance of missing out on people with real life experience who might be able to do the job better? Their loss.

I would like to finish by saying that the majority of women I have worked with in professional life have been without any issues or problems towards me.