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Last Sunday, I had dinner with my extended family in Germany. They’re what they call ‘Bildungsburgertum’, best class and best-in-class, educated middle class of doctors, teachers, and executives. They accordingly vote either green or social democrat, and gasp if someone dares defend the Afd or Trump.
Cousin‘s girlfriend says she’s in the running for a promotion at the bank she works for because the banking regulatory agency “suggested” they need more ”diversity“ at the top level. She might lose the job to a less competent woman because her rival is also the “director for sustainability” and the title sounds good to the powers that be. I ask her what the hell a bank has to do with sustainability . “Exactly. She just gives a silly PowerPoint presentation once a year and uses that “fulfilled mission” as an excuse to be incompetent on everything else”. Her male boss/colleague/friend did not appreciate being summarily passed over and has tended his resignation.
After the ladies retire to the boudoir, a different cousin’s husband, who works in IT at a large company, picking up on my skepticism, sits next to me and whispers : “It’s pointless if you’re male.” He tells me he just refused a promotion because he doesn’t want to deal with the headache of having women under him, and the constant humiliation of forced diversity. One of his colleague’s career was apparently ruined after a sexism accusation, although he didn’t give details.
He recently had a woman in a junior post who could not do a simple task and would cry sexism(“I feel like you’re always contradicting me and not the others”) if corrected in public or reminded of her duties. He just did her job for her and never corrected her again.
Final words: “I’m not a masculinist or feminist, I hate all those things. I just wanted to do my job. Now I do the bare minimum, I don’t care anymore, I’m a loser” (I had brought up Rao’s archetypes of Psychopaths, Clueless, and Losers earlier).
There was some controversy recently over Helen Andrews’ essay on the feminization of the workplace. I consider all internet discourse a priori overdramatic and disconnected from real people who just touch grass at a barbecue in ignorant bliss. But this couple of anecdotes suggests real life (in Germany, at least) is actually worse than the widely-decried-as-misogynistic Andrews take: open widespread discrimination against men (obviously), ubiquitous fear of one-sided legal and professional penalties, declining competence at all levels.
I was a bit worried about the direction of this stuff a decade ago but it petered out, at least in the fields I'm exposed to (private sector industrial concerns, finance, tech, healthcare and large governmental organisations).
I've seen fairly mild tendencies of this in tech, especially American companies, but nothing major.
There are sectors that seem a bit broken, like academia and media but i have never worked in either sector and dont really know anyone that does so it might just be my negative bias.
Perhaps things are really different in Germany compared to the Nordics. Even though i lived and worked in Hamburg for a while I can't say I have any great insight into the state of things and it's hard to compare.
At least here, people complaining about this stuff today are almost invariably bitter losers, rather than pointing at something real. There is discrimination against men, but it isn't really happening there.
This sounds... weird. It's happening. But not here! There are people here who are complaining about it happening here, but we can be confident almost all of them are bitter losers. Is it possible that you're lucky to exist in a bubble of relative reasonableness? Or maybe just bad at noticing things.
To be fair, this guy is Swedish. The sense I get from my Swedish friends is that nobody is allowed to complain about anything in Sweden (except maybe bad fika), and if you do, you are ipso facto some kind of bitter, deformed outcast, a defiler of the Jantelagen. The big old Swedish companies are also culturally fairly old-fashioned in the sense of focusing on their business, I'm sure there are many places you can hide from this stuff, and if you think that it's only a problem when you personally see it that's basically luck of the draw in your coworkers.
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