No one has done more damage to the employment prospects of young women than Labor and their feminist activist mates. 

As the #March4Justice screeched its way through Sydney, women everywhere sighed. They knew how much harder their working lives were about to get while political activists clawed into the camera lens, hoping to use the ladder of victimhood to climb to power. Forcing gender to the top of the national conversation benefits the careers of the radical fringe, but it shreds the employment future of Australian women. 

In the same way that Critical Race Theory has turned our children into racists, continuous talk of gender makes decent men accidental misogynists. 

When I first entered the workforce, it was on the coattails of strong women. The Baby Boomers were the women who forced their way into corporate Australia and worked their guts out to prove that they were just as good as their male counterparts. Offices were full of life, humour, sexual energy, a bit too much drinking, and an outpouring of creativity. They were the golden decades of long lunches and raging Christmas parties where ‘work’ was also a life. 

Even before the corporate world officially acknowledged women as a ‘mainstream asset’, our grandmothers and great-grandmothers were slogging it out side-by-side with men to drag civilisation out of a hostile continent intent on killing them. They had no special privileges. While the men hunted, built, and fought, the women were having a dozen children and running family businesses. Then everyone went to war. The lives of both genders were an exercise in hardship. Women were different, but the equal of men. 

At the end of the nineties, women could be whatever they wanted. 

The ability to enter any industry is not the same as demanding that every industry be split equally by gender. While genders have the liberty to work wherever they want in a free market, industries will naturally have different gender ratios. This is not a sign of institutionalised victimhood, nor is it something for the government to fix. 

Labor, the Unions, and feminists like to point at engineering or IT and gnash their teeth – complaining about the lack of women. 

I have worked in IT all my life. No one has ever tried to stop me. There were no groups of men standing over me, threatening my position with sexist slurs or abusive quips. If anything, I had the unfair advantage. Plenty of gentlemen offered to carry my heavy computers down Pitt Street, even though I politely declined as it was my job. When you’re a blonde in heels in a room full of men, you are many things but ‘at a disadvantage’ is not one of them. 

Here is the honest truth. Women are not as interested in those industries as men are, in the same way that men are not interested in childcare or reception work. For years I tried to hire a male office assistant to no avail. Should we conclude that blokes are not literate enough to file documents and answer phones? I will believe that the left care about gender equality in the workforce the day they sack half the garbage collectors and replace them with women. 

Just as women were starting to enter their employment stride, the activist left teamed up with Third and Fourth Wave Feminism in what has been a disaster – one that women have kept silent on out of fear. 

For women to have equality in the workforce, they have to offer the same benefit to the business as men. It is not just about women having equal rights, they must also pose an equal risk. Businesses have to make money and employees are company assets. If one employee presents a serious financial threat to the company, a smart CEO will not hire them. 

Labor and their activist mates have created three major roadblocks for women in the workforce. 

The first is paranoia. The rise of #metoo has turned ‘victimhood’ into a gravy train where even the most pedestrian social error can be turned into a weapon against both the business and its employees. Humans are social and sexual creatures. When they work together, there has got to be a bit of tolerance. Not ‘activist tolerance’ – real tolerance. 

The vexatious fringe of Millennial females have transformed offices into a lawsuit minefield. Where once women in senior positions held one-on-one meetings with their male counterparts, they now require chaperones. This embarrassing development is for their own safety and to protect the reputation of men from unfounded accusations of sexual harassment. It has infantilised the workforce where, like children, they have to be monitored at all times in case the Big State needs to be called in. Far from fostering a healthy working environment between the sexes, it has created a crucible of suspicion and paranoia, with predators on both sides. 

Gender quotas, which have been trending in the press, are not only an insult to intelligent women, they are wrecking balls to their reputations. After all the work generations of women went through to earn their place, the left have thrown a toxic shadow over every single woman. 

When you discover that the boss’s kid is the manager, it does not matter how good he is at his job, the staff will always assume that he is in that position because of his dad. It is an accusation that undermines everything he does for his entire career and breeds resentment within the office. That is what gender quotas do to women in the workforce. Men can never respect women whilever they view their presence as a token action by the boss. It also promotes unqualified women into positions they cannot manage, causing them to fail and create an impression that women are not up to the task. 

These two issues are minor compared to how women choose to balance career and family. 

There is nothing women can do about the biological fact that only their gender can give birth. It is a task that requires them to take time off work that men simply do not have to. This is something that women take great care to manage with their employer. The introduction of paternity leave was about the only time in which women finally found themselves on common ground with their male peers. It was almost, almost equality. 

When Labor Leader Anthony Albanese came out and announced his party’s plan to increase paid maternity leave to six months, women everywhere groaned. To those in love with their Big State Sugar Daddies, it sounds like free money. For real women in the competitive business world, they know that if their boss has to pay for six weeks of nothing (either directly or through levies), they are going to find a way to replace them with a bloke. 

This is also bad news for female business owners. Right at the time when business is on its knees from Covid lockdowns, the government wants employers who can barely cover their wage bills to fork out for their staff to reproduce while covering a second wage for their temporary replacement. 

Political activism will always lose to corporate risk. That is the trick with Socialist policies – they require other people to pay for them. In a tough financial climate, the cost will come in the form of women’s jobs. 

If a business has to choose between a young man with forty uninterrupted working years ahead of him during which time he can be relied upon to work overtime – or a young woman who, after a few months of employment with expensive training, gets knocked up and takes six months maternity leave with the company having to pay for a temporary replacement and hold her job open, they are going to hire the man. 

Women are frequently asked if they are married or have boyfriends so that employers can ascertain the ‘risk’ that they might fall pregnant. Even those who have no intention of doing so are brushed aside for ‘safer’ male options. Men cannot help it. All humans are born to reduce risk to themselves, and now activists have made women extremely dangerous in the workplace. 

When all of these ‘progressive’ handicaps are added together, it is Australia’s young women who are missing out, not just on careers but also vital mentorship. They are falling behind because of Labor’s identity politics and radical feminist activism. 

At the same time, working women are accused of being traitors to their gender by feminists. 

Feminism is a political – not a gendered movement. Women can never be ‘traitors to their gender’ because gender does not have an ideology. Your tits and balls do not organise themselves into agreed political dogma and issue themselves a party membership. You can only be a traitor to radical feminism – a position which I am happy to take while their activists seek to destroy women’s careers.

Alexandra Marshall is an independent writer. If you would like to support her work, shout her a coffee over at Ko-Fi.