Behold, my feminist agenda

To solve gender inequality, the good people at Sky have been offering free training in digital skills to women. Because the problem is that they are unskilled. It’s definitely not that they aren’t afforded the same opportunities. Nope. They just dumb.

Let’s break this shit down shall we.

The gender balance of workplaces has changed a lot since the good old bad old days of Mad Men, and women make up around 47% of the workforce in the UK. A big factor in the increase in women in work is financial. We now live in an economic reality where the idea of a family being able to support a mortgage and children on just one income is a laughable concept. Of course there have been major societal changes too. Women can live single, independent, self-sustaining lifestyles without being tagged as unloveable spinsters or tied to rocks and thrown in a local river to test our black magic. And there isn’t the same pressure as there was to get married and have 20 babies before we’re old enough to know better.

But the other part has to do with skills. Girls have been outperforming boys at school for a long time now. And it’s not by a small margin. Boys are 50% more likely than girls to fall short of basic standards in reading, maths and science. And 63.6% of girls achieve 5 or more high grade GCSEs compared to 54.2% of boys.

And before you panic that this is feminism creeping into the schools (god forbid) this also happens in countries where women’s rights are restricted in some pretty severe ways.

So women aren’t reliant on men for societal acceptance or bringing home the bacon anymore. And they outperform men academically and educationally. But somehow when it comes to the real world and we asked to have our skills or abilities recognised, suddenly we “just don’t have the goods sweetheart”.  

Thank goodness so many people recognise this and are trying to fix things by training us weak minded lovelies on scary things like “digital skills”.

(Before anyone jumps on me – I’m not talking about genuine attempts to encourage more women to study STEM subjects in higher education, because it’s pretty embarrassing that we’re considered “almost unknown” in STEM jobs and the more women who move into that field the better. Everyone stands to make a whole lot of money from that.)

What I have an issue with, are these attempts to fix inequality by applying light smear of patronising tokenism. Especially ones that waste everyone’s time and offer no formal qualification at the end.

I’m getting really, really sick of this shit.

Are thousands of women suffering catastrophic brain injuries between their graduation ceremonies and entering the workforce? No. So stop treating us as if we’re the problem. As women in digital we are not allowed to leave our sex organs at the door when we walk into a room – and we are STILL being greeted in these rooms by assumptions of inadequacy.

I’m not going to apologise for sounding like yet another woman on yet another feminist rant. I also don’t care if you think I’m grasping at a topic to spread my terrifying feminist agenda (yes, we recruit, just like the gays). The people who still make stupid, outdated assumptions about the skills of women in the workplace are the ones who should be sorry.

Now, I know this equality thing can be a slippery slope. first you start treating and paying women equally in the workplace and the next thing you know you’re hiring dogs just to meet quotas. I get it.

Is a vagina a petrifying, dank cave that all your hopes, dreams and profits will fall into if you step too close to it? Are ovaries actually two-headed alien thetans plotting world domination from our lower torsos (praise Xenu)?

Or is the real threat that some bitch might turn up and do your job better than you?

Just cut this shit out, let women in the room, treat them with respect. Oh, and pay them equally for fucking being there while you’re at it.