Are you living in a pit of worry at work, frightened of getting fired for doing the tiniest thing wrong? Do you fear that your kids will be worse off than you? Have you ever suspected that you’ve been denied a promotion at work because of who you are, not what you can do?
Well, join the club. Or maybe not, because this particular club was apparently founded for white men and white men only. “Millions of men are walking around on eggshells at work too scared to speak freely, while knowing that being male can now be a disaster for your career,” according to Tim Samuels, a former BBC documentary-maker turned presenter of a YouTube show called White Men Can’t Work!, which launches this week.
The first episode includes an interview with Chas Bayfield, a middle-aged advertising director who won a sex discrimination claim over being made redundant after questioning what his female colleague’s vow to “obliterate” the firm’s white, privileged and male image meant for people like him. Work was, Bayfield explains on the show, the one thing in life he felt really good at and being let go was devastating: “My first thought was ashamed … I assumed I was bad at my job, that I’d suddenly become bad at my job, that I was not needed.”
From the interview, which focuses on how men’s identities are often deeply bound up with work, it’s clear what a profound impact that injustice has had on him. What is rather less clear, however, is how one hard case becomes “millions” of men tiptoeing around the office in fear of their professional lives, suddenly realising what a disaster it is to be wearing the trousers, at a time when men still out-earn women by a measly 7% on average and the unemployment rate for black men is more than twice that of white men.
Enter a poll specially commissioned for the show, which helpfully found that 41% of respondents were “often anxious that as a white man I can be sacked over doing or saying the wrong thing”, while 24% even felt their mental health had suffered “as a result of a diversity drive” at work.
And yes, you are allowed to roll your eyes now, along with, I suspect, at least some of the 49% of white men who ticked a decisive, snorting “no” to that last question. Yet tempting as it is just to dump a giant bucket of cold water over the idea that poor white men are the official victims now and move on, something about the minority claiming real distress should set alarm bells ringing – if only about to whom exactly they’re talking and listening.
It’s not just white men who spend their 50s watching anxiously over their shoulders, constantly wondering if they’re about to be replaced by someone cheaper and half their age, and how they’ll survive financially to retirement if that happens. But do enough middle-aged men have people in their lives they can confide in over what is secretly an almost universal fear? And if they don’t, who else is stoking their insecurities and channelling their indignation towards an easy target? (Noticeably, the conviction that the working world is out to get them was significantly stronger in Reform UK voters.) Do the younger white men Samuels says are feeling “very despondent about their futures” realise how many other twentysomethings feel exactly the same, and would it change anything if they did?
It would be interesting to know, meanwhile, how the third of white men who worried their sons would have worse opportunities than they did feel about their daughters’ prospects. (For a good decade and a half now, polls have been consistently finding that parents of both sexes think the days of expecting your children to do better than you did are over.)
The third of young white men convinced they’ve been passed over for promotion because of their identity, meanwhile, might genuinely benefit from comparing notes with the 53% of young women who told researchers for the Young Women’s Trust that they think the same has happened to them. (One in three HR decision-makers sampled by the trust confessed to being aware of some form of discrimination against women in their organisations in the past year: they weren’t asked if they’d seen something similar happening to white men, but again it would be a fascinating question.)
I don’t doubt that some of the anxiety Samuels identifies is real. There are enough badly managed companies around to make it plausible that some have handled diversity programmes as clumsily as they handle everything else. Working life feels tough right now, with redundancies looming and lucky breaks harder to come by, and it genuinely is more stressful when you’re constantly having to second-guess yourself or worry about getting things right – as older women and minorities, who had to do exactly that for decades in order to fit in to male-dominated offices, of course know better than anyone.
So if white men genuinely don’t think work is working for them, welcome to the club, boys. Just don’t forget that some of us have been here rather longer than you.
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Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist
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