A problem solved is an existential crisis for an activist. After all, once the problem is solved, what is an activist to do? Dust off their hands, shut up shop, cancel all the grant applications and go and get another job? Or double-down and turn the tiniest remaining molehills into towering mountains?
The whales were saved decades ago. From 1980s on, whale populations have rebounded almost as fast as they declined at the turn of the 20th century. Today, there are more whales than any time since the early 1800s. Speaking of whales, feminists are even less determined to admit victory than Greenpeace.
Hence, feminists have to keep inventing ever-more-threadbare ‘problems’ that simply don’t exist. The ‘gender pay gap’, for instance, or so-called ‘rape culture’. None of these are real, nor stand up to the slightest critical analysis, in the West. (Oddly enough, the only real rape cultures, such as Islam or illegal immigrants, are openly fetishised by feminists: go figure.)
Never ones to let go of imaginary victimhood, the most privileged women in human history are now resorting to an even more ludicrous, imaginary ‘problem’: a so-called “glass cliff”.
The hypothesis, cooked up by the usual cabal of grievance-mongering academics and corporate grifters, posits that women are only promoted to the corner office when a company is already barrelling towards the rocks. The sinister patriarchy, you see, merely sets them up as convenient scapegoats. It is heads I win, tails you misogynist: if a woman is denied the top job, it is an outrage of systemic exclusion; if she is granted the top job, it is an ambush designed to watch her fail.
Into this minefield of manufactured woe stepped Chris Bradley, a senior partner at McKinsey who made the fatal error of believing that intellectual debate was still permitted among the managerial elite. When the appointment of a female chief executive at retail giant David Jones was predictably decried on LinkedIn as another victim chucked over the edge, Bradley dared to question the premise.
“(I)t sounds like you are saying that once we had a problem of female advancement to ceo, but now we have a new problem that the jobs they get are too hard? Is this actually a thing?,” Bradley wrote.
“(T)his theory is a very convenient way to always be a victim in the rain and empowered in the sunshine,” wrote Bradley.
A more accurate summary of modern feminist agitprop has rarely been committed to the screen. Naturally, such unvarnished common sense could not go unpunished. Bradley was conversing with Julia Carreon, author of a tome peddling the very same nonsense and founder of an outfit styling itself ‘Fifth Wave Feminists’. Because four waves of unrelenting fishwife screeching were apparently not quite enough to exhaust our collective patience.
Carreon responded not with intellectual rigour, but with the standard weapon of the contemporary commissar: tagging Bradley’s employer in the thread, ensuring the HR department’s alarm bells began ringing at top volume. The squabble was leaked to the press and the corporate cowards did precisely what corporate cowards always do when confronted by an aggrieved sisterhood.
Within days, McKinsey stripped Bradley of his role as director of the McKinsey Global Institute, solemnly mumbling that his queries ‘fell well short of the standards we expect at the firm’. The bloodlust did not halt at his employer’s boardroom door: media hounding soon bullied him into resigning from the board of a charity, Opportunity International Australia – an outfit where he had spent a quarter of a century helping impoverished women lift themselves out of actual, grinding destitution. Real women in need were casually sacrificed so that affluent corporate harpies could secure their pound of flesh.
The supreme irony of the ‘glass cliff’ doctrine is that it treats women as utterly devoid of agency, portraying seasoned female executives as feeble-minded dupes who wander into burning buildings without looking at the balance sheet. Actual female executives know this to be drivel, but they dare not say so aloud.
One senior female corporate leader who did want to talk said that claims about the “glass cliff” are “simplistic and a lazy way of thinking”. She won’t allow Inquirer to publish her name because, as she said, “it’s very unpopular to not be one of those simplistic thinkers”. “The bullies are in charge.”
Well… no kidding. The boardrooms of corporate Australia are thoroughly terrified of their own shadows, quivering before Twitter mobs and self-anointed high priestesses of perpetual victimhood. Anyone who whispers that the emperor – or rather, the empress – has no clothes is quietly frog-marched out the door. The activists get to protect their book sales, the consultants keep their diversity retainers and the rest of society is ordered to nod along with the farce.
