#somethingtosay

Britain still has long Covid but no one is talking about it… so says Sunday Times journalist Josh Glancy and I couldn’t agree more. I felt that I was in a tiny minority in the lockdown years because I profoundly disagreed with government policy, raged at the lack of holistic thinking about the likely consequences of lockdown, the shutting down of alternative opinions and most of all the collusion of all politicians. But what really disappointed me was the acceptance of farcical rules and total compliance to them by the majority of the British people. I found my tribe and sanity through social media, something I had used rarely before. I also had some like-minded friends who felt the same. It wasn’t just me but we were treated like social pariahs…

 Why were other people not questioning a rule that said that six people was allowed but not seven? Or why they were allowed to go for one walk but not two? Why were we not allowed to use our own human concern and common sense for our elderly parents and act accordingly? Why were children and youth treated on a par with older adults when the risk of harm from the virus to them was astonishingly small? Why were we not given the easily available figures (ICNARC) for who was most at risk of serious illness i.e. middle aged overweight men, people with co-morbidities, the obese.  We only knew old people were at risk. Why were we not told it was a respiratory illness and that we would all benefit from a daily dose of Vitamin D?

Instead taking advice from the likes of Professor Ferguson (who had failed miserably in his predictions some years before on swine flu and who broke lockdown rules himself) and who in his March 2020 paper said that as a democracy we probably wouldn’t follow China in setting a lockdown policy but then Italy did so ( yippee!)  Britain could and should. The government ignored  Anders Tegnell, chief medical officer  in Sweden who stood apart and used evidence and not hysteria to advise on policy. It ignored the three public health scientists who published the Great Barrington Declaration, arguing for ‘focused protection’ in October 2020 and allowed the media to undermine them.  I could go on…

In this excellent article Glancy says what very few dare to say. That we were struggling from a number of issues before 2020 – a NHS that wasn’t fit for purpose for such an ageing population and advance in medicine, a financial system still suffering from the impact of the crash and subsequent quantitative easing, declining productivity from importing cheap labour and an increase in mental health issues of young people caused by use of mobile phones.  But that government Covid measures massively accelerated all of these problems.

The government  basically ground the economy to a halt, borrowing nigh on £300billion to pay people for not working, track and trace (hopeless), technology to monitor our compliance ie whether we were vaccinated or not, building hospitals they knew they couldn’t staff and on it went. A massive spending spree, a panic in the face of something they equated with a war. Even the language they used was warlike.. enemy, battle, victory etc.

An article in the Harvard Business Review written by Scott Berinato in 2020 identified that what we were feeling  at that time was collective grief, both for loss of our everyday lives,  loss of contact with friends and family but also a huge sense of uncertainty about the future and our safety.

This uncertainty and feeling of lack of safety were deliberately deployed by governments in their shameless policy of promoting fear to induce compliance, as advised by behavioural pyschologists ( A State of Fear by Laura Dodsworth)

 We were fed a daily diet of death and disaster.

This period exaggerated a sense of the need for safety over risk and led to an over reliance on the government for our well- being.  However if you take the government during the Covid period to be like a parent figure with the population its children, then like in David Winnicott’s theory of the good enough parent, the government failed in creating a safe enough holding environment for us to flourish.  It created instead a sense of dependence.  We are still living with that today.

The BIG question is why these consequences of lockdown are never referred by the government /politiicans or indeed by many journalists. Mind you, the latter were a massive disappointment too as they never openly questioned government policy at their briefings. The BBC became a mouthpiece for the government.  The Covid era revealed the cosy relationship between government and tech companies, the latter becoming increasingly a vehicle for government control.

The Labour government is quick to blame the Conservatives on mismanagement of the economy but not the mismanagement of the Covid epidemic. Why? Because as the opposition party they supported every single measure and indeed want more and harder lockdowns. They all colluded.

Anxiety among the population is at an all-time high. Five years on from the first lockdown  4.5 million people are claiming some kind of sickness benefit, with around 1.4 million PIP recipients (England & Wales) citing mental health as their main condition in April 2025, a 70% jump from January 2020. Mental health conditions now make up about 39% of all PIP claims as of spring 2025, making it the largest disabling condition group. In the age group 16-24 a staggering 34% report anxiety/depression symptoms, with 41% for young women.

We have learned this week that over one million 16-24 year olds are neither in education nor the workforce… has the government considered that the impact of disrupted schooling and social development may have something to do with this.

A ferret around social media will produce hundreds of theories and experts on the role of trauma in anxiety yet I have yet so see many pinpoint the role of the collective trauma of lockdown on the nervous systems of the whole population (this is the topic of another post for later).

No one seems to want to talk about the impact of Covid but these are conversations we should be having because as Glancy says “Despite the pandemic’s continuing effects, it stays firmly lodged in our collective unconscious. But we should not leave it there. To paraphrase Carl Jung, until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life — and you will call it fate.”

In the current debate and indeed concern about men and boys in western societies most male commentators are keen to avoid blaming women – in contrast to the Andrew Tate’s of this world – insisting that we can have gender equality and men can thrive too.

But what if the recent questioning of men’s role in society and their reported unease and confusion has got something to do with women’s progress? Women have been taking their place in the public world that used to be the sole preserve of men and men are being asked to move over and give up some of their power. And perhaps consciously or unconsciously they don’t like it and feel threatened – that would be perfectly understandable. Since time began men have dominated societies by oppressing women and preventing opportunities for them – much of it veiled to appear the natural order of things. The past one hundred years has seen much of this dominance begin to unravel in the West. It is a very different story in other parts of the world where patriarchal hold over societies is still very strong.

It is important to locate what is happening today in gender relations in some kind of historical and social context. Someone who attempted to do this twenty five years ago was the psychiatrist and broadcaster Dr Anthony Clare who sadly died in 2007. He was famous for his radio programme In the Psychiatrist’s Chair.

  I came across his book, “On Men: Masculinity in Crisis’ the other day quite by chance and decided to read it.  He sets out the topic he examines in the book like this:

“Now the whole issue of men – the point of them, their purpose, their value, their justification – is a matter for public debate”

 I was particularly interested to see whether Dr Clare’s analysis had stood the test of time and I think that current commentators on men and masculinity would find a lot of useful information here.

Dr Clare had the advantage of writing at a time when the huge social change that was women gaining footholds in the public sphere had really begun in earnest. And he maintained that it was this shift of women from the private to public realm that had caused men to founder.

What he noted and today’s commentators fail to do is that women have made these gains through their own struggles. I cannot think of any freedoms won by women over the last one hundred years that haven’t been hard fought for, and then legislated for.

“But phallic man, authoritative, dominant assertive – man in control not merely of himself but of woman – is starting to die, and now the question is whether a new man will emerge phonic-like in his place or whether man himself will become redundant.” (Clare 2000)

We don’t hear quite so much of the ‘new man’ as we did twenty odd years ago. What we are hearing now is that a lot of men aren’t very happy with the status quo and require some kind of support.

Women have moved into the public sphere, gaining positions in most professions, workplaces and politics and are better educated and more economically independent than ever before. But instead of women’s educational achievements being praised by men, it is very often positioned as a problem for men,,, there must be something wrong with the curriculum which has been declared as too feminised, boys are failing, girls are outstripping them, there aren’t enough male teachers. They aren’t enough male role models… I find this one quite puzzling as men are still at the top of almost all our political and business institutions. Why aren’t they role models?

 Decades ago the writing was on the wall for the type of workforce that was going to be needed in the West. We moved from being an industrial economy to a service economy where soft skills are more in demand. If men have failed to learn them whose fault is that? A quick glance at other more highly prized sectors of work, like tech, hedge funds and private equity will tell a different story – women there are few on the ground. And we know that AI is highly dominated by men so women are left behind there.

Perhaps we can concede that to a certain extent men have lost their hold on women and therefore some of their power. Some would say that men like colonists don’t like seeing their empire crumble – but Clare points out that it is hardly crumbling. Men still occupy the vast majority positions of power throughout the world, The colonists he says are very much still in command. And that is still true twenty five years later.

The changing economic and social landscape resulted in men being asked to improve their emotional skills, demanded by the workplace as well as by women, their partners. Five years before Dr Clare’s book Daniel Goleman wrote a game changing book called Emotional Intelligence. Without specifically stating it this book was aimed at men in management.

Here we had emotional skills, expected from women ‘naturally’ and often unacknowledged and therefore unrewarded (The Managed Heart by Arlie Russell Hochschild is a brilliant analysis of this) packaged up as a management skill to be learned via training.

This was difficult territory. Emotion in the workplace had been actively discouraged for decades with women often being considered ‘too emotional’ for a senior role. But empathy was now a requirement of good management, particularly as the workforce was now made up of so many different types of people. Men were in a bit of a bind as they were/are being asked to embrace something that previously they have scorned.

Clare doesn’t just just address the problem of men and masculinity through the lens of social roles.

He tackles the problem of male violence (and acknowledges men’s mental health, although this has emerged as a public issue in more recent years).

“Throughout the world developed and developing, antisocial behaviour is essential male. Yet for all their behaving badly, they do not seem any happier.” (Clare)

Clare even takes a stab at trying to understand why men have hated women in such numbers in every country throughout history. It is this misogyny, which informs all feminism that men, even decent men find hard to acknowledge. But they must. The evidence is there. Violence towards women is still unacceptably high in western societies too. Clare also discusses male violence, sexual violence, rape, prostitution pornography … all the ways in which men oppress women and to use a de Beauvoir phrase ‘second sex’ them.

On looking at the reasons for male violence towards women Clare says “it is at one and the same time a demonstration of how that power has failed and how violence is the ultimate resource available to men who wish to control and dominate women!’

And he insists that any theory which attempts to explain male violence against women needs to take account of misogyny in its most foul and lethal form.

Clare and many second wave feminists believe that the root of misogyny is that men fear women. They are born from women’s bodies, and depended on them for several years. They see women’s creative role in procreation and that apart from conception women have little need for men to bring new life into the world.

“Women represent everything that men do not have – their rootedness in the realities of life, creation” ( Clare 2000)

Fear and even envy led to the need to control and dominate (Women’s Creation by Elizabeth Fisher)

But for several decades now that dominance has been challenged.

Few men today can talk about this – especially with other men. It doesn’t mean that all men today feel this way, of course not, but men must discuss explanations of their historical control of women.

Since the publication of Dr Clare’s book, the march to increase female presence in public life has for the most part continued. Whilst women have made great inroads into public sphere, men have not been so keen to do the same into the private sphere of home and family.

Their lack of presence in female dominated sectors is presented as a puzzling problem that can be solved by some encouragement in the same way as women were encouraged into STEM topics. But the two situations couldn’t be more different. Women were responding to historical barriers, men have had no such barriers apart from the fact that certain sectors have always been dominated by women. And as such they are not valued, the pay is poor. Kat Banyard in her book, The Equality Illusion  notes that women are concentrated in the 5 C’s: cleaning, caring, clerical, cashiering and catering. Many of these jobs are considered ‘women’s work’ i.e. perhaps work they traditionally may have done in the home and for which they are thought more suitable.

 Indeed this video clip of a discussion about how hard it is to bring up a boy today shows interviewer Peter Crouch laughing when Russell Kane asks how could  he could possibly ask his son to be a nurse or a primary school teacher – as if the very thought of it was absurd. This tells you everything you need to know about how women’s caring role in and outside the workplace is trivialised and goes unrewarded

Have men stopped and thought about the social changes and their own changing role in the way Clare hoped? No,not really. The recent concern over men’s health and well-being particularly emotional and mental health is to be welcomed. But their neglect of both is nothing new. What is new is the certainty over their role.

These are difficult topics. Fifteen years ago I trialled a workshop on gender differences and power but it didn’t go down well. If I stuck to stereotypes and our bias that was ok but bringing in power made both the men and women in the room uncomfortable and defensive – particularly the men.

One can read the reluctance to engage with patriarchal history, feminism and women’s history as evidence of a lack of respect for women or perhaps it is guilt. Young women themselves do not know their history as it isn’t taught in schools. What I took from Dr Clare’s book is that any discussion of masculinity, men, men’s social roles, men’s emotional wellbeing etc. has to include some history of relations between men and women over the past century as well as the continuing sexual violence and sexualisation of women.

“Crying at work? You’re dead in the water if you do that!”  a female senior investment banker  said  in an interview.   Another male manager in an airline told me that  “someone once cried but they had to leave the building to do it, so that give you an idea of how acceptable that is.”

 These quotes are from the chapter Style Matters in my book ‘Women’s Work, Men’s Cultures (2011)’ and from the reaction that Rachel Reeves’ tears have caused it is clear that not much has changed. The freedom to express emotion and what kinds in the workplace  depends on the nature of the work and the culture.

The incident should put paid to the strangely popular management idea that employees should be encouraged to bring their whole selves to work. They shouldn’t – particularly in the competitive high status worlds of politics and finance.

Controlling emotional upset caused at work or leaving behind sadness and perhaps personal grief at the front door of your workplace requires a huge amount of effort. Boys learn this at a young  age but girls are given more leeway to express sadness until they go to work which is still designed with the male in mind.

In the 1980’s I worked in a very male-dominated environment where there was plenty of emotion flying around – particularly in the trading department.  There always is when there are huge amounts of money at stake. Anger, frustration and yes joy when a deal was done. However the expression of emotions such as love, sadness, fear or any signs of vulnerability were and I think still are generally considered unprofessional.  

At that time I was sent to work in Japan and struggled in the very male and foreign culture. One day I was presenting some analysis to a Japanese broker in his office when I found, like Rachel Reeves, the tears just wouldn’t stay in my eyes. He asked me if I was ill and I shook my head. He eventually backed out of the room and returned with his boss who had spent time in New York and was perhaps more used to dealing with Westerners and in particular women. At that time Japanese women were only permitted to work as tea ladies in banks. The only other Western woman working in our office was called to come and collect me. I had broken an unspoken rule. No expression of sadness in the office.

Years later as a financial journalist there was more leeway to express emotion. At one publication our department was quite female dominated with the male editors tucked safely behind their glass windows. There were occurrences of tears and upset but we usually headed straight for the loos often to be followed by a concerned colleague. There was no such exit available for Rachel Reeves, nor I noticed expressions or signals of concern from surrounding colleagues.

“I’ve seen behind the curtain. What I witnessed wasn’t equality—it was control, silencing, and bullying.” Respondent Survey of Freedom of Expression in the Arts 2025

This report, AFRAID TO SPEAK FREELY, published by Freedom in the Arts, last week highlights the extent to which two fundamental problems at the heart of diversity and inclusion need addressing:

Firstly, certain policies and practices have been overly influenced by social justice concerns and theories and,

Secondly an unhealthy groupthink culture has developed around D and I (or DEI) which discourages any debate and punishes any opposing views.

“This study describes the perilous state of freedom of expression of the arts because of viewpoint intolerance, ideological orthodoxy,  and bitter  punishing reprisals Examples are made and that is enough. You need your job, contract, you want to be accepted into the team, you acquiesce. You announce your pronouns at the beginning of each  meeting because you have been told to although you have profound disagreement with the practice.”

The impact of certain political ideologies has led to overreach in policy and practice as well as many lawsuits and which I have written about quite a lot. There has always been tension between social justice and the business case and in the past it has usually been productive – there has been excellent academic work done on this by Gill Kirton,Anne-Marie Greene &Deborah Dean. (British diversity professionals as change agents – radicals, tempered radicals or liberal reformers? )

As an example, I am a feminist but if this had been my only credential I wouldn’t have got through the front door of any company.  In fact I have never have used the word although it has undoubtedly informed the way I think and work. Yet today theories like critical race theory and gender identity theory,  arguably much more contentious and contested theories, have been openly welcomed and embraced by the corporate world. If I was cynical I would say the reason is because these two relate to a very small minority of employees whereas feminism challenges the dominant patriarchal interests more. Critical race and gender identity theories often focus on performative actions and demand little major change in how organisations function whereas embracing feminism may demand more from the dominant male leadership.

It has taken the the law not public opinion to force organisations to think again. Even then following the Supreme Court ruling last month ( link to interim EHRC guidance) some organisations have flouted their intention to ignore the ruling. But the private sector is usually business focused – costly legal cases with the subsequent reputational fallout is not what they want – and some have announce a shift their policies, even if it is in name only, just like the US tech companies did following Trump’s denouncement of DEI.

 Diversity and Inclusion work has never just been about legal issues, but they have always underpinned it. Many is the time I have been brought into a company because of a tribunal case. It used to go without saying that it was imperative to keep within the law even if organisations wanted to do more than the minimum legal requirement. Offering more maternity leave than the state minimum is going beyond the law but doesn’t go against the law. But when the ‘rights’ of one group impact the ‘rights’ of another then legal boundaries may have been overstepped as we have seen in one case after another.

The second issue, which this report focuses on, is that this sometimes quite radical approach (to DEI), out of step with mainstream thinking, has been enforced on employees in the name of ‘inclusion’. Any opposition  is met with hostility, silencing and shaming. This censorship is not unlike that of an authoritarian regime.  It is certainly every bit as chilling. Whilst threat of violence for ‘wrong speak’ may not be present, other punishments lie in wait, acting as warnings to others. The report describes what happens;

“ careers get stalled, projects quietly dropped, jobs are ended, funding and careers endangered if one crosses certain lines”.

Eighty per cent of all respondents experienced ostracism or intimidation for speaking out. The ostracisation by one’s own peer group is particularly upsetting. Unlike being the brave rebel standing up against authorities, you are cast out by your friends and colleagues, or shamed publicly on social media, our modern day stocks.

This is a terrible indictment of Diversity and Inclusion, which has made the headlines for all the wrong reasons. Do DEI heads not realise that acquiescence is not acceptance? Fear has resulted in a deadly self-censorship.

 It is ironic that the more ‘progressive’ the sector the more authoritarian the culture seems to be. If only we could isolate the arts (and we already know about the universities) and say it’s over there but not here. That sadly is not the case. This culture from my understanding exists to some extent  in most organisations in most sectors where there is a DEI function. The emergence of gender critical employees, via the SEEN networks is testament to that.

 The report lists the five most common taboos…i.e. these topics MUST NOT BE DISCUSSED or even debated  because the ‘correct’ stance has already been stated, repeated and must be shared by all employees. We can probably all guess what they are.

Number one….. Gender ideology.

Number two…..Critical race theory..

Number three Israel and Palestine ..a left wing obsession despite the many other appalling conflicts taking place in the world.

Number four Religion… but only one  – Islam. Jokes and jibes about Christianity are acceptable but not about Islam

Number five …Brexit The media did a great job on calling any opposition to Brexit  right wing.

Being called right wing is just about the worst thing that can happen to someone in the arts. I can only imagine that agreeing with any Trump policy will get you cast out too.

Have the DEI leaders not heard the term groupthink? It caused the financial crisis in 2008 and many other corporate calamities.

That so many in this sector do actually believe in these ideologies to the point of religious fervour is worrying and needs research in itself. It looks as though our university education has a lot to answer for. It may not be all the above issues that are taboo to challenge in your organisation but even one or two is not healthy.

The final call from the report’s  authors Rosie Kay, Denise Fahmy, and Professor Jo Phoenix who have all been cancelled, is for leadership to step up and make clear statements affirming employees and artists right to express lawful opinions even if contentious. We are waiting.

( I wrote this a few months ago but decided to publish it now. There has of course been a lot of turmoil in HR and DEI since then but this piece is looking at HR more generally in the light of specific criticism of it)

At the end of November 2024 a few press articles critical of the current state of HR resulted in a statement from the Peter Cheese CEO of the CIPD, defending the profession and the body itself. To my knowledge there were only three articles  one by Pamela Dow, who headed up the Inclusion at Work Report, in the New Statesman and one by Iain Martin, the business and political writer, who wrote on it for Reaction and then again in the Times.

The criticism from the two writers were largely that HR departments had grown too fat, had too much power and were not improving productivity or profitability. 

How times have changed. Historically HR has lacked much power and indeed a recent article by Richard Harpin, founder and CEO of Homeserve, pleaded for more HR specialists to be elevated to main boards in order to have more influence!  In the late 1990’s I  did some research at British Airways and  the CEO, Bob Aisling was one of very few chief executives who had an HR background. But BA had a very people orientated business and culture and took HR seriously. All management had to rotate and do some time in HR.

So how is it that HR have too much power yet actually have very little formal power?

The accusation about it not contributing to business profits or even being a drain is not new. Twenty years ago certain very profit focused companies would pride themselves on keeping the HR department lean. As a support function its status was low, viewed as a necessity which caused problems and introduced obstacles to the smooth running of making profits . This low status cannot be separated out from its predominantly female profile- going into HR was an acceptable area of work for a young woman forty years ago whatever the sector.  Received wisdom had it that women’s ‘natural’ ability to deal with people made them the most suited to the job.

“Every business is a people business, no matter its product or service, so you want the very best people-people at the summit — those who know how to strengthen organisations with positive, purposeful cultures, a clear identity and values that drive the overall strategy. Much of this is down to a great HR team that knows how to develop staff consistently, improve team dynamics, motivate people and bring them together around an agreed agenda. Perhaps if more HR executives — very often women — were given the right cross-business experience, the gender ratios of FTSE 100 bosses might be a little less imbalance” In general we need more cross business experience ( like as I mentioned above British Airways practised )

 It has been the role of HR’s industry body, the CIPD to upgrade and professionalise the sector via its numerous courses and I think on the whole it has done a good job. It did however come under criticism in Dow’s piece for being too dominant, leading to a kind of groupthink among HR professionals. For instance it has a monopoly on training the Civil Service.  This has made it vulnerable to attack.

The growth in the HR sector that Pamela Dow’s article illustrates in a graph may be explained by the increasing body of legislation that companies now have to contend with together with the increase in litigation risk

There is no doubt that HR’s brief has broadened, particularly with the growth over the past fifteen years of ESG (formerly CSR). The intention was to broaden  the responsibilities  of companies to be more than just about making profits for its shareholders. A lot of this has fallen on HR’s shoulders, particularly the DEI and employee welfare which is much more comprehensive than it used to be ( ie including understanding the menopause, mental health etc.) Many in the corporate world are now questioning their strong focus on ESG (environmental social and governance) as an investing principle given the harder economic ( and interest rate ) environment resulting in cutting back on some policies. Some of this backlash has inevitably been directed at HR and their part in DEI and other employee focused policies

It seems harsh to blame HR as the sector that has had to implement policies that are part of this broader approach taken by senior leadership. However the role of HR is to support management in its business strategy and to be the voice of employees and look after their welfare. These are often in tension. Ultimately in a restructuring or downsizing, it is HR which often has to do the unpleasant task of telling employees they are sacked.  It always has to manage this tension. My guess is that in some companies the focus on wellbeing, wider social change and particularly DEI is contributing to this backlash.

I don’t think HR would have come under any such scrutiny and criticism if it hadn’t not been the home (in most cases) of DEI. When my colleague Sue Ollerearnshaw and I wrote the Business of Diversity Report in 2002, large organisations often place the Diversity and Equality function outside of HR – specifically because of the historic low status of HR that I mentioned above.  Procter & Gamble, Barclays and Ford all kept diversity and equality out of HR “ This issue is far too important for HR!’ joked one senior director at P&G then “ so it has always been owned by the whole business”.

Mainstreaming as advocated by the EU was the name of the game then and we really believed that once embedded throughout the organisation the need for specialist D&E or D&I professionals would decrease. How wrong we were. The numbers of DEI professionals has accelerated hugely in the past ten years. What we didn’t see coming twenty years ago was the influence of identity politics on this area of work. Usually theories that abounded in universities stayed in universities. Certainly despite my PhD on gender and culture being informed by feminist theory, if I had used the word feminist in any work proposal I wouldn’t have got through the front door. So it was with some surprise that organisations public and private were so quick to embrace gender identity ideology – arguably a much more nefarious theory than feminism and has no material basis. And then it supercharged on critical race theory, an analysis of race relations which is grounded in US history of race and arguably not appropriate here.  Perhaps it was because they thought it would only impact a tiny percentage of people and therefore not radically alter the way work was structured. Dow’s observation that the majority of HR professionals comes from the arts departments of universities, where social justice theories are much more likely to dominate may help explain the enthusiasm with which gender identity ideology and critical race theory is now infusing HR policies throughout organisations, is interesting.

The way the T was added to LGB gave the ideas a legitimacy it would not have had on its own. It still does not explain why so many resources have gone into the cause arguably to the neglect of other diversity strands like disability.  Of course we now know the demands of the trans movement required change that impacted everyone not just a handful of employees and the confusion around how different characteristics within the Equality Act 2010 interact has led to many tribunal cases, with companies in some situations being found to act unlawfully. The equality lawyer Audrey Ludwig wrote a very good piece on this here.

It is this overreach of DEI that has led to a small revolt against the whole of HR. Unfair you may say. Well the CIPD has engaged quite heavily in some of this DEI overreach itself coming under criticism last year for its trans guidance, “Fury over official trans and non-binary guidance to HR staff: Gender-critical campaigners slam ‘impractical’ advice that says refusing transgender women access to female-only toilets at work may be discrimination” It has since revised that guidance in September this year without any prior announcement and it has not been made available to the public unlike previous guidance. This in itself was a strange move designed perhaps to fend off accusations that it got it so wrong the first time.

I do hope that HR professionals and DEI professionals can have a debate about these issues and defend good work whilst perhaps cutting back on some of the more overtly political aspects of their work. In the end HR does not have power.. it has stemmed from weak leadership feeling ill equipped to deal with issues about which they know very little and they have delegated to HR. The ultimate blame must lie with leadership.

Many of today’s LinkedIn posts are expressing fear and upset at the news that two US giants Meta and Amazon are cutting back on their DEI programmes and that some staff have already been made redundant. Some people say they are leaving Facebook and WhatsApp in protest in much the same way as those that dislike Musk left X (formerly Twitter) and went to BlueSky. That is a personal decision and totally up to them.  But those who work in DEI have to confront a more substantive dilemma.

A breeze that began a year or two ago has gathered strength and as we enter 2025 the wind of change is strong. The times they are a -changing and DEI is already undergoing a radical shift. Most companies will put up a metaphorical finger and reposition themselves in the direction of the leading companies. That leaves all those who work in DEI with a dilemma. When and where to stand firm?

Explanations for the cut backs  given by Amazon include “we are winding down outdated programs and materials related to representation and inclusion,” and “the term ‘DEI’ has also become charged, in part because it is understood by some as a practice that suggests preferential treatment of some groups over others”.

At Facebook misgendering is no longer considered  no longer a policy violation. In a statement Mark Zugerberg said that controlling speech had gone to far.  For detail in the policy changes there is an excellent analysis here

Meta, fresh off  its announcement to end factchecking, follows Amazon, McDonald’s and Walmart in rolling back diversity initiatives, effective immediately.

We don’t have to search long and hard to see that these companies are preparing the way for a closer relationship with Donald Trump, who has on many an occasion made clear his views of DEI. A closer reading of the statements though show that the intention to create a more diverse and inclusive workplace remains but the approach has changed. Not such a good headline though!

While we are not on the cusp of having a right-wing leader like Trump in our own country, on the issue of equality and diversity we have always taken our lead from the US – both in approach and language and this time will be no different. However we also have our own internal calls for change.

Challenges to ‘accepted progressive’  DEI approaches to transgenderism, race and religion are often met with accusations of  being ‘right wing’ – which stifles and silences as it intends to rather than engages with the criticism. If the accuser is more careful they may use the term ‘anti woke’ – in itself meant to be a slur when in reality it is often received as a compliment! Even the CIPD leadership said in a foreword to the latest annual report “We’re responding to the ‘anti-woke’ pushback , helping membership….” It may have been more helpful to engage with the pushback rather than dismiss it.

The growing number of tribunal cases being brought where DEI has gone wrong and led to discrimination of an employee is testament to the fact that that not all critiques of DEI are confined to ‘right wing’ commentators. Something is wrong. The cases are a symptom not the cause.

Following the ground breaking Forstater case in 2019  which made gender-critical beliefs a protected characteristic under the Equality Act 2010,  the cases have come thick and fast and the complainants are winning –  Phoenix v Open University (2024), Fahmy v Arts Council (2023), Meade v Westminster City Council and Social Work England(2023).. and only last week Bird v Liberal Democrats (2025)

The latest and perhaps most important case has already led to promised changes in policy by the Civil Service.

In this case Eleanor Frances, former employee  received £116,000 from two departments , Dept for Culture Media and Sport and Department for Science Innovation and Technology for discrimination and unfair dismissal due to her gender critical beliefs. Both departments had been advised by Stonewall.  Immediately in response to this decision civil servants will no longer be labelled “transphobic” for expressing gender-critical beliefs under new  Civil Service guidelines.

My general DEI Advice for 2025 and beyond

The term DEI that is now associated by some with negative practices may disappear but good practices will continue and new names will emerge.

Continue your strategy to foster an inclusive culture, identifying barriers and tailoring policies to remove them and where possible use data – both to identify specific issues and to show impact after taking action.  Always tie in proposed policies to the business needs. Celebrate successes.

Ensure all employees are mindful of differences, and that they can learn from one another, emphasising our common humanity rather than a hierarchy of identities

Revisit the language you are using in DEI and depoliticise it. This the workplace not a student campus – out with cis, equity, misgendering, neo-colonial, microaggression, compelled pronouns.  All employees must be comfortable using diversity terms, not just younger graduates.

Be very clear about the law – it changes all the time via case law. Court cases are costly and damage reputation.

Choose any training carefully.  Some lawyers are now recommending training in gender critical beliefs and freedom of speech.

Leadership should not be held to ransom by younger more politicised employees. If you as a senior leader do not understand the issues it is your duty to learn about them.

Depoliticise you staff networks – these networks should work as support for employees and a conduit to feed into company policy.

Leave Stonewall schemes and cut back on flags, parades and special days. Focus on the material and practical not the ideological.

In a few years’ time we will find it extraordinary that a section of the adult professional population, including MPs protested at the recent announcement  by Health Secretary Wes Streeting that puberty blockers were going to be banned indefinitely.

They think they know better than the evidence of a four year research project culminating in the Cass Review  and the many clinicians who left the Tavistock Clinic GIDS before it was closed down, having witnessed first-hand the weak criteria on which these drugs were prescribed to youngsters.

But then so do the LGBT lobby groups that have been advising both public and private sector on LGBT issues for years. Both Stonewall and Mermaids have come out against Streeting’s decision.  They want kids to have access to life changing hormones.

 Many people knew a decade ago that there was no evidence to support the use of puberty blockers, that almost 100% of those prescribed them went on to use cross sex hormones (so not a pause activists and clinicians have always used as a justification) and that more than 85% of all these children will desist once they have gone through puberty. The majority of these youngsters are gay or lesbian – 70% are female – and as many as a third are autistic but such has been the indoctrination in schools and the NHS that feelings of body dysphoria and other mental health issues  have been interpreted exclusively through the lens of gender identity.

Unfortunately for the kids the solution they are told will reduce their physical and emotional distress, puberty blockers, leads them onto a medical path that has life changing consequences, including sexual dysfunction, infertility, permanently changed bodies etc etc. No matter, the chorus of progressives said (and still say) it was imperative that these children be given the drugs they needed.  A fabricated myth that if they weren’t given them they would commit suicide is still being shamelessly used to force parents to consent to their use.

Such an extreme ideology and its practice requires support from key institutions in society to gain credibility and traction. The global lobby keen to get gender identity embedded into national legal systems particularly targeted education, law and government.  Its method was to avoid political debate and ride on the wave of human rights and early adoption of gender identity by global human rights organisations like Amnesty International has been key to its success. After all who wants to be against human rights?

Legal, corporate and government organisations embraced the ideas, keen to show their progressive credentials and helped by having the EHRC as well as the CIPD as promoters of the ideology for several years.  Just like any pernicious ideology, those who didn’t agree publicly were cast out, shamed, blackballed and expelled meaning that the vast majority of people put their heads down and said nothing. It has been nothing less than authoritarian in its implementation.

In September 2020 Over 100 companies, including Aviva, BP, CITI, Disney, Expedia, Microsoft and Sky signed a letter in support of trans rights saying ‘trans rights are human rights’. It didn’t say which rights trans people currently do not have only that they are ‘under threat’, widely understood by many as meaning feminists have challenged the demand that biological males identifying as women use single sex spaces and participate in female sports.

For gender identity to be accepted as something innate it must be there from birth and not developed in adulthood. So the indoctrination of children was vital. They needed to be told that they had a gender identity and also that it may be different from their biological sex. This ideology was cleverly  introduced into schools by newly formed LGBT groups under the guise of anti-bullying and PSHE training. The report “Only adults? Good practices in legal gender recognition for youth” funded by Dentons law firm and Thomson Reuters Foundation outlines an international strategy for advocating legal transition in youth and is illuminating. The activist role of these two large companies in the whole child transition debacle should be well publicised and condemned.

The corporate sector must take their share of responsibility for this shameful episode. It was targeted by Stonewall an organisation which had already earned a good reputation for its work in LGB issues and added the T in 2015 unchallenged. Keen to expand their ESG activities and demonstrate wider stakeholder responsibility than increasing profits for shareholders, business’s enthusiastic participation in this wider LGBT campaign gave activist groups and their ideology validation, credibility and money. Private and public sector organisations alike participated enthusiastically in the Stonewall Workplace  Equality Index and the Stonewall Champions Scheme and applied whatever policies they were told would give them high marks. Stonewall has also had an active Schools Champions Scheme for many years and has undertaken training in many schools, including primary schools.

 Some corporates including Starbucks and Wagamama have implemented special campaigns to support controversial charity Mermaids which specialises in ‘helping’ children in their quest for transition. The following companies were quoted on the Mermaids website as being supporters of the charity –Lloyds, Barclays, Tesco, Aon, BP, BCLP, P&G and Unilever. One wonders just how much due diligence was done before committing funds and their names to such a dubious activity.

History may tell why professional adults and the organisations they work for went along with this harmful propaganda for so long. I have often wondered  if it had had more of an impact on boys and men a challenge may have come sooner. It took grass roots feminist organisations as well as courageous individual women years to counter this ideology and the practices and policies that it spawned for which they were abused, marginalised or cancelled.  

What we are seeing now is backtracking by some, a retelling of history or a quiet dropping of pronouns by others. Businesses are seeing the way the wind is blowing (as does Streeting, a former Stonewall employee) and many have already withdrawn from Stonewall schemes. I doubt there will any further corporate support for Mermaids.

All the HR and DEI professionals that supported and promoted the focus on transgenderism in diversity but shut out any dissenting voices should learn a lesson.  Suppressing debate under the guise of inclusion is wrong. And in this case it is children who have been damaged the most.

Nearly twenty years ago, I was researching some large organisations for an Opportunity Now report (Diversity Dimensions: Integration of Diversity into Organisational Cultures) and one FTSE 100 company stood out. Pearson PLC had had two top female executives on the board for six years – Dame Marjorie Scardino, CEO and a finance director, Rona Fairhead.  This was highly unusual at the time and it was achieved without any specific diversity goal or initiative. I interviewed a few male board directors to discover more. What I found was that these men were much more liberal and socially aware than most FTSE 100 directors,  were not threatened by female leadership and were prepared to make room at the top for these women. The corporate world, particularly at this level is extremely competitive and it is no good pretending that women aren’t competing with men … they are.

Power once obtained is hard to give up. For men and women to work together at all levels of organisations, men must be prepared to give up some power. Power never sat happily with the concept of diversity and inclusion but as this post is about men and their support it is really important to bring it into the room. The subtitle of my book Men’s Work Women’s Cultures is Overcoming Resistance and Changing Organisational Cultures because the resistance to women’s equality is real and needs to be addressed.

Most of the men working in the field of diversity and inclusion will, like the Pearson male directors  be liberal minded. They are on our side. We need them to persuade other men both at senior levels and middle management of the very real barriers to women’s progress at work and to actively support their female peers. This isn’t an easy ask.

Male ally isn’t a new term, although few leaders would use it, certainly the Pearson directors didn’t. Their actions and behaviours spoke for themselves. It has been used on occasion for many years to describe men in organisations who support the efforts for women’s equality. Professionals know that without male leadership behind policies and practices plus the support of middle management change just doesn’t happen.  There has been an increase in the use of the term within the DEI sector with some men, mostly consultants now describing themselves as male allies and promoting the term ‘allyship’.  This post isn’t to berate these men at all as their work is very important but ‘ally’ is not a term I like as it implies that non allies are by default enemies. This in itself may unintentionally  create a them and us, a good guys and bad guys scenario, making men defensive.

I have assumed that the role of a male ally was to use their more ‘listened to’ masculine voice to highlight organisational barriers to women’s progress in organisations and persuade male leadership and male employees of the need for change. A recent LinkedIn post by a well known ‘male ally’ listed all the subtle and not subtle barriers that women faced in the workplace. He was correct in his choice of barriers but it wasn’t difficult… women have been listing these for years. But the quite substantial attention he received was from women, out of 223 reactions only seven were from men.  In a similar vein another well-regarded ‘male ally’ put up a post about a talk he gave at an Inclusion conference. But guess what – the audience were almost entirely women, just as it usually is when anyone male or female gives a talk about diversity, gender or inclusion. The hardest part of this work is persuading men to accept that the workplace is still gendered in their favour and change is needed. It is easy to fill a room with women who are grateful that a man understands their hurdles. But if you cannot fill a room with men, perhaps start with a small group.

What do women want from ‘male allies’?

For me it is to enable challenging conversations with men and begin the work that men need to do, both to benefit themselves but also women in their organisations. To work with men in a way that is more difficult for women to do.  A Catalyst Report in 2009 , Engaging Men in Gender Initiatives, showed that 74 per cent of male interviewees identified fear as a barrier to men’s support of gender equality – fear of loss of status, fear of making mistakes and fear of other men’s disapproval. This research itself could form the basis of a productive discussion with men.

Men’s issues today and the changing role of women

Most of the male ally literature discuss the problems women face in organisations in terms of women’s issues rather than in terms of men’s issues. However there is a lot more social commentary on men and boys today and it tends to focus on their ‘lostness’, their loneliness, the high level of male suicide, the current crisis in masculinity( eg.Richard Reeves, Jordan Peterson, Chris Williamson). Women, myself included, are also concerned and beginning to comment on the topic and show support. There is also concern about the fact that women are steaming ahead on the educational front leaving men behind – young women are starting to leave men behind  FT.

A focus on this is very welcome, as emotionally stable and happy men and boys is good news for women and girls and society in general. However some of the commentary carries an undercurrent (sometimes stated more overtly) of blame toward women and particularly feminism for somehow emasculating men. The sub text is ‘If only women hadn’t taken men’s places, they would be ok’.

 Very little of it (commentary) acknowledges let alone interrogates men’s historical relationship to women and their role in women’s subjugation or the changes that women have fought for in the face of male resistance. For all their frailties the fact remains that men still hold most positions of power and have the most influence over our culture. In other parts of the world they continue to dehumanise women with impunity.  Women have campaigned for change in their own lives and so can men.

I would like to see men educated about the history of women’s rights and encouraged to discuss their fear of losing status and power, their desire or not to spend more time caring for family members, their ability or not to express emotion and vulnerability, what kind of lives they want, what kind of relationships they want – in the safety of male only groups.

Understand women’s everyday lives and concerns and communicate them to male employees

Recently the interruption by Siorse Ronan during a TV chat show in which young men were joking about the uselessness of having a mobile phone when being threatened at night ignited much discussion about gender relations. How good are they? Saoirse Ronan’s polite reminder to her male panellists on the Graham Norton Show that women are constantly pre-empting attack got cheers from women in the audience. The young men on the panel were dumbstruck, maybe because they had not thought about it before. Why not? Men that harangue women for not wanting males in our spaces regardless of how they may identify are showing the same lack of awareness as Eddie Redmayne and Paul Mescal were on that show. We have no idea whether a man walking towards us is harmless or not. We are brought up to assume he may not be. This leads me on to why women may fear men and another topic for male allies to address with other men.

Discuss the ubiquity of male violence and sexual violence and its impact on women

Like many other women I wrote and posted about the Pelicot case and like them received huge number of comments and interest.  But my search to find a male writer commenting on the case has failed to find anything.  This horrendous case rather crushed the often repeated defence of ‘not all men’ when women generalise about men’s bad behaviours. The image of the lineup of fifty or so  very ordinary ‘respected’ men who had chosen to rape an unconscious woman really shook women up. The publicity around the case provided a brilliant opportunity for men to discuss male sexuality, where and why it is used against women and harms women but instead there was silence.

The increased sexualisation of women and girls in recent years has an impact on all women’s lives both inside and outside organisations. When we walk into work we carry with us all the values of wider society. If most of the men in your department consume pornography what do they actually think of the woman manager in front of them? I remember the campaign to ban Page 3 of the Sun newspaper led by Labour MP Clare Short, for which she was ridiculed daily. Women found it uncomfortable to sit opposite men on the bus or train whilst they gawped at the bare breasts on Page 3. But that looks harmless compared to what many men watch these days. We know that 67% of all pornography depicts violence towards women. What do men think about pornography? Such an important topic for men to discuss.

The specific barriers women face in the workplace are widely known. What is less known is the impact of the wider social context and the role men continue to play consciously and unconsciously for any remaining inequality. Male allies can play a key part in facilitating discussions of ways in which they can institute meaningful change for themselves and for women.

List of resources…. Earlier

Male Order, Unwrapping Masculinity ( Chapman and Rutherford 1987) https://www.amazon.co.uk/Male-Order-Masculinity-Rowena-Chapman/dp/0853156905

In the Company of Men by  Gruber and Morgan(2004) https://www.amazon.co.uk/Company-Men-Dominance-Harassment-Northeastern/dp/1555536379

Men’s Silences: Predicaments in Masculinity by Jonathan Rutherford 1992 https://www.amazon.co.uk/Mens-Silences-Predicaments-Masculinity-Orders/dp/0415075440

Masculinity and the British Organisation Man since 1945 by Michael Roper 1994 (https://www.amazon.co.uk/Masculinity-British-Organization-Since-1945/dp/0198256930

Men as Managers Managers as Men  D. Collinson and J. Hearn(1996)  https://www.amazon.co.uk/Men-Managers-Perspectives-Masculinities-Managements/dp/0803989296

Updated here 2023 Routledge Handbook on Men, Masculinities and Organizations. Theories, Practices and Futures of Organizing : edited By Jeff Hearn, Kadri Aavik, David L. Collinson, Anika Thym

And more recent

Engaging Men in Gender Initiative:  The Catalyst Research https://www.catalyst.org/research-series/engaging-men-in-gender-initiatives/

Collaborating with Men. Changing workplace culture to be more inclusive for women: Murray Edwards College Cambridge University 2018   https://internationalwim.org/iwim-reports/collaborating-with-men-changing-workplace-culture-to-be-more-inclusive-for-women/

Men as Change Agents: Women’s Business Council published by the Government Equalities Office 2018 https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/5a75604840f0b6397f35df2a/Report_on_Men_as_Agents_for_Change_in_Gender_Equality.pdf

Why do so many incompetent men become leaders by Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic 2019 https://www.amazon.co.uk/Why-Many-Incompetent-Become-Leaders/dp/1633696324

Men Stepping Forward. Leading your organisations on the path to inclusion by Elisabeth Kelan.. https://www.amazon.co.uk/Men-Changemakers-Practices-Inclusive-Leaders/dp/1529230020

Rebels with a Cause: Reimagining Boys, Ourselves and Our Culture by Niobe Way https://www.amazon.co.uk/Rebels-Cause-Reimagining-Ourselves-Culture/dp/0593184262

The current state of DEI is coming under increasing criticism;  for too much emphasis on social justice; for being overly influenced by identity politics; for its lack of business focus; for its tendency toward groupthink; and for its authoritarian stance on beliefs which stifles employees into silence. Many wise and experienced consultants have dropped the DEI from their work titles preferring to use organisational behaviour, leadership and culture instead.

Language and definitions

In the UK, more than in Europe, we import US ideas and language when it comes to this topic despite having completely different histories of oppression and discrimination. A shift in language may reflect a shift in approach, a gear change, welcome at times of diversity fatigue. When I started out in this sector in the 1990’s it was called equal opportunities or sometimes equality. Then came diversity which was considered more business friendly and less legalistic. This didn’t happen without some debate. Many were concerned that putting all the inequalities under one umbrella and calling it diversity would mean that some groups would lose out – disability particularly. Some noted that the word diversity merely meant difference and conveyed no element of power or inequality. Others felt that gender shouldn’t be considered as a part of diversity given that women are half the population. Inclusion (culture focused) was added to suggest that acknowledging difference wasn’t enough, everyone had to made to feel included. The turn to diversity was embraced by the corporate world, although key organisational issues like the gender pay gap and sexual harassment do not sit happily under its umbrella. Ultimately organisations still have to have an eye on equality and discrimination law. More recently the concept of equity has been adopted by UK organisations with very little debate and so we now have DEI – Diversity Equity and Inclusion.

Criticism

A lot of the criticism of DEI is coming from ‘the freedom of speech’ corner writers like Douglas Murray. The Free Speech Union published a report on how EDI was crippling British business.Many DEI specialists have dismissed these criticisms as ‘right wing’ attacks. However there are a few others like myself who have a lot of experience in the sector and know something is wrong. And we are anxious, unlike Murray et al, not to throw the baby out with the bathwater. There is some really good DEI work that produces tangible benefits to organisations which have been overshadowed by reports of compelled pronouns in emails, prohibiting debate and free speech, endless months and weeks devoted to specific groups and other performative practices which can alienate many employees.

Earlier this year Kemi Badenoch and her team at the Equalities Office published a report called Inclusion at Work which was critical of a lot of the sector whilst acknowledging that work on diversity and inclusion remained important but must be tied more closely to the business. You can find a summary of its recommendations here. This report should have been widely debated by internal and external DEI consultants and managers. Instead it was met with a stony silence or hostility.

 Last month the incoming CEO Nick McClelland of a leading diversity consultancy, Byrne Dean, acknowledged that there was ‘a growing disillusionment with EDI and even somewhat of a counter movement resisting it’. He believes that the disillusionment is because of a gap between pledges and tangible outcomes and says that there ‘must be a core business strategy to work’. I and others think that there is something rather more than disillusionment and lack of outcomes that is creating a backlash. But even the business case argument is being challenged and the popularity of mass unconscious bias training has been on the wane for a while now. There have been several articles written about the failure of diversity policies.

How did we get here? Too much focus on social justice?

Following the financial crash of 2007/8 large US corporates began emphasising their commitment to ESG (Environment, Social and Governance) and a broader concept of stakeholder (stakeholder capitalism) in order to shift the criticism they were receiving about profit and greed. Investment firms began to insist on ESG requirements from their investments. UK firms followed suit.  Strong lobby groups rode this crest and public and private organisations began to sign up to a broader approach to business which encompassed care for the environment and social inequalities. DEI is very much the S in ESG. So diversity and inclusion, once a rather neglected marginalised department of often one part time employee was given far more recognition. Whilst social justice had always been an element of diversity and inclusion, it took on much more importance. It is only now fifteen years on that some people have begun to see ESG as something of a distraction from profitability and the return to shareholders.

DEI as a central tenet of ESG is caught in this backlash.  Some companies  have found that not all their customers agree with some of the causes that they are promoting e.g.Bud Light’s sales fell between 11 and 26% in the month after a partnership with a transgender influencer, and the brand lost its status as the top-selling beer. And only last week Ford announced it was scaling back its DEI policies following on from a number of other US companies. 

Organisations used to limit their diversity efforts to what was achievable, legal and appropriate for their business. They could be ahead of the law in terms of giving more generous maternity leave provisions or have more extensive flexible working practices but they never suggested their role was to be agents of social change. Today identity politics and social justice theory including critical race theory, transgender ideology, intersectionality, colonialism and the concept of privilege have escaped the confines of the university campuses and have seeped into organisations under the umbrella of equity. Flags are waved at marches and on websites.

The turn to equity

As mentioned above there has been very little debate about the use of the term equity to replace equality. Indeed when searching for material all I could find were articles explaining why equity was a much more appropriate term to use than equality.  Leading diversity consultancy Pearn Kandola published an article last year called Why Leaders Should Lead With Equity (Not Equality)

To explain the difference the author gives us the image of running a race, with equality as the finish line. “But equity recognises that not everyone starts in the same place. Equity is about adjusting the starting line so we can all run a fair race.”

Equal opportunities also recognised that not everyone started in the same place – hence its name – and also that  organisations were biased towards white males.  Companies serious about diversity and equality have been assessing their recruitment and appraisal processes for bias years before the word equity appeared.  The Pearn Kandola article begins with a quote from Kimberle Crenshaw on intersectionality –  a term not widely understood, contested as a theoretical tool and which certainly has limits in any practical application.

McKinsey has also published on the preference for equity over equality:

 “Equity refers to fair treatment for all people, so that the norms, practices, and policies in place ensure identity is not predictive of opportunities or workplace outcomes.” (The Equality Act protects nine characteristics. There is no mention of the word identity)  It continues  “Equity differs from equality in a subtle but important way. While equality assumes that all people should be treated the same, equity takes into consideration a person’s unique circumstances, adjusting treatment accordingly so that the end result is equal.”  The whole point of diversity was that it recognised difference. This isn’t new. What is new is that we now refer to identity and privilege and there is a hierarchy. But who makes the judgements of relative advantage between individuals and groups (by virtue of their characteristics)?  The DEI manager?  Which characteristics count? And do some more than others? What treatment should be applied to whom? These decisions are fraught with problems and can lead both to alienation of the dominant employee group and also antagonise those who do not want ‘preferential treatment’ due to a particular characteristic.

There is a limit to how much organisations can do to iron out social disadvantage. Some would argue it is beyond their remit.  Ultimately companies have to obey the law. There are no equity laws, only equality laws. The culture of progressive politics and the power of lobby groups has led many organisations to inadvertently enact policies out of line with the law.

Groupthink and cancellation

Another criticism of DEI is that it has resulted in groupthink, the opposite of what true diversity strives for. Simon Fanshawe OBE, one of the original founders of Stonewall and now very critical of it, discusses the impact of identity politics on the diversity and inclusion industry in his excellent book The Power of Difference and is well aware that there has been a growing tendency in this industry to have ‘right’ answers with which everyone must agree. ‘it is a peculiar feature of modern identity politics that the struggle for diversity is too often matched by a demand for rigid conformity.’ 

And what has happened he suggests is that ‘the nobility of those causes has sometimes given rise to mantras that mask the complexity that needs to be understood to significantly improve those responses’.

 We need to have difficult discussions and we can live with productive disagreement rather than agreement. We aren’t seeing these encouraged. Instead employees are told what are the right views and language to adopt, often by politically motivated lobby groups and activist employee groups in very poor ‘training’ sessions.  And they are punished if they do not agree either by being shamed, cancelled or sacked. There is now a growing number of very public tribunal cases, following the Forstater case which ruled that gender critical beliefs were legal, brought by  employees who have been dismissed due to their views on biological sex.  No wonder DEI is getting a bad name!

It is time for a reckoning. Those in the sector must acknowledge what has gone wrong and fix it or the reputation of DEI, EDI, D&I Diversity and Inclusion or whatever you want to call it will be damaged irrepairably.

In the 1980’s I was working in the City and found myself steeped in a very male work culture. Today people would call it toxic but in those days it was just the norm. Myself and the few other young women who worked there were not the norm and there were plenty of reminders of that! In a trading environment you had to deal with comments on how you dressed and worse on a daily basis.

There was annual investment analyst dinner held at the Grosvenor House and the first year I went my boss took me to one side. “Be careful this evening, he said, and do not get into a lift with a man on your own, even if you know him”. I thought this a bit over the top but by 10.30 pm I understood his warning. There were about 500 men and fewer than 40 women at this dinner and many of the men were very, very drunk. I took myself off to the ladies cloakroom and saw a man I knew and thought to be a rather old-fashioned gentleman in the corridor. I was shocked when he lurched towards me in a very leery fashion and I dodged out of the way, went to the loo and then decided to go home.  I have never forgotten it. If he could behave like that when under the influence of alcohol, I thought, any man could.

When I returned to the City ten years later to do some research into gendered cultures, I needed the help of men. How men behaved and what they did when women were not around was impossible for me as a female researcher to find out. “I don’t think women have any idea of how men talk about them when they are not present”, one man told me. This reminded me of what Germaine Greer said in her seminal book, The Female Eunuch, “Women have very little idea of how much men hate them”.

Perhaps my experience, age and research has given me more of an insight into men’s behaviour than most women, but for those of us who love our fathers, have brothers, sons and male partners some of it is still upsetting and uncomfortable to acknowledge. We collude with the more comfortable narrative that only very few bad men say and do unspeakable things to women and children, until we are confronted with evidence of the opposite. And even then we will try to find a reason why it’s not the norm.

Every so often a case emerges which disrupts this narrative and reveals an ugly truth – that perhaps a very large number of men may indeed think so little of women that they could sexually violate them. Today of course the case is of the Frenchman Dominique Pelicot who over many years drugged his wife, Gisele, unconscious before raping her and then inviting other men via a website to do the same. So far nearly one hundred men are thought to have done so, with fifty of them on trial as well.

If it had just been Monsieur Pelicot, who we hear had been an exemplary father and husband, we could have just explained it as a split personality, that underneath he was a monster akin to the horrendous Josef Fritz. Fritz kept his daughter Elisabeth locked in a cellar from when she was 18 until she reached the age of 42. Trapped underground and enslaved, she was raped thousands of times by her own father and gave birth to seven of his children.

But in the Pelicot case a large number of other men were involved. Only three refused to rape the unconscious Gisele Pelicot but even they didn’t report it. This all happened over several years in a tiny village in Provence. Were all these men also monsters? Did they all have split personalities as some psychologists are suggesting is the case with Dominique Pelicot?  We know that they included  civil servants, ambulance workers, soldiers, prison guards, nurses, a journalist, a municipal councillor, and truck drivers. All ordinary men, most of whom are husbands and fathers. What are we to make of this? There isn’t really an escape route via a comfortable narrative here although I have heard one man blame it on French culture saying that it couldn’t happen here in the UK. But very few men are saying anything about it all and I wish they would.

I suggest the Cleveland child abuse scandal was another such disruptive case. For those who aren’t old enough to remember it, over the course of a few months in 1987, 121 children were removed from their families in Cleveland ,Yorkshire ( then a county)  because of concerns of sexual abuse highlighted through medical examinations and wider assessment.  However the public could not tolerate the truth that so many men, fathers even, really did sexually abuse their children, including babies in the family setting. There was outcry and media hysteria with blame thrown instead at the professionals and in particular the pediatrician, Dr Marietta Higgs, who diagnosed a lot of the abuse. An inquiry was set up by the government and published a report in 1988.

The Inquiry made no assessment of whether or not the children were sexually abused, though clearly this would have been helpful. Writer Beatrix Campbell  subsequently uncovered evidence, through documents now released in the National Archive, that indicate most of the children were sexually abused, and that the diagnosis by medical professionals was correct. Furthermore, her book, Secrets and Silence: Uncovering the legacy of the Cleveland child sexual abuse scandal,  reveals that documents that would have confirmed this reality were amended, diluted and in some cases disappeared and this, at best lack of transparency, or at worst deliberate cover-up, has had lasting impacts.

I relate this as an example of the lengths we will go to as a society to avoid facing the uncomfortable truth about men’s sexual behaviour.

Another case is surely the Rotherham child abuse scandal, where we know that groups of men passed round as many as 1400 troubled girls some as young as thirteen and raped them multiple times over a period of several years. There and in other northern towns professionals knew about the abuse, but chose to sacrifice the girls rather than accuse a Pakistani group of men  which they felt would upset community relations. Indeed the fact that in this case the men were mostly of Pakistani origin enabled the narrative of ‘other men’ to continue.

The reluctance to acknowledge the scale and extent of male violence and sexual abuse is because it is too unsettling. We live and work with men, among men. Many of us love men. As women we just try to avoid being a victim, yet we know that few women will have been lucky enough to come into adulthood without some unpleasant experience of sexual harassment or abuse.

In 2015 a study undertaken at a US university found that out of a small sample (too small to generalise) one third of the young male students would use coercive force to have sex with a woman if they could be sure they wouldn’t be caught.

 A more recent UK study (2021)– and a more statistically robust one –  found that over 10% of male students admitted to rape or sexual assault of a woman in the past two years, which is pretty horrifying.

We have come a long way since I was a young broker in the City. Women in the UK have so more equality in the workplace and there is now plenty of public discourse around women’s rights. Yet we know from history that women’s progress is often followed by backlash. We cannot even pretend that we live in an equal society whilst so many men are still violent and abusive towards us. Men, please get talking about this. We need you to.