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Yvonne van Dongen
Veteran NZ journo incredulous gender ideology escaped the lab. Won’t rest until reality makes a comeback.
Today I present my second item of evidence that woke is here to stay.
And yes, as in my previous Substack, I do sheet home a major reason for this to the increased participation of women in the workforce and elsewhere.
To those who say this is unfair and ignores the very real battles women have had to fight to get where we are now, here is my response. Women are not a protected class. In my opinion, to shield women from criticism infantilises us and condemns us to eternal victimhood.
To shield any sector of society from criticism does the same, be they Māori, Muslim, European, male or whatever. In order to truly understand what is happening in the world today, we need to be prepared to interrogate all assumptions and all groups, even the so-called vulnerable minority groups.
The Diversity Equity and Inclusion (DEI) solution may well have sprung out of serious injustice and prejudice against women and minorities in the workforce. No one doubts the laudable intentions behind the initiative – to even up the playing field. But DEI has since been shown to lead to reverse discrimination, prioritising race, sex, or other identity characteristics over merit, qualifications, and individual achievement.
Whether DEI was ever the answer to this injustice is a question worth asking. The problem with many solutions to the ills of the world is that they sound great but don’t work. Note to self: read Thomas Sowell.
That American writer Helen Andrews’ essay The Great Feminisation has had such a huge impact is, in part, due to the fact that she uses data to argue in favour of a phenomenon many had sensed but didn’t dare articulate.
Andrews is not the only woman to make this case. In this podcast interview titled Feminism and Suicidal Empathy, the founder of the Australian-based online magazine Quillette, Clare Lehmann, talks to Freya Leach. Lehmann makes the distinction between the feminism of the 21st century and that of Mary Wollstonecraft who, in 1792, wrote The Vindication of the Rights of Women which encouraged women to get a decent education and be rational beings so that they could exercise moral choice and virtue.
Paradoxically, I see a lot of feminism today is actually infantilising of women and wants to promote the idea that women like us are victims of this invisible patriarchy and these structural forces. And I think that’s actually a reversion back to the social dynamics where women were kept under paternalistic control.
But to return to the case I want to make here – I used to think that if pressure/a miracle/bold politicians ever succeeded in dismantling the charity industrial complex propping up the rainbow grift, gender ideology would disappear. Starved of taxpayer finance, the organisations and people actively promoting this gibberish would fade into obscurity.
I no longer think this is true – partly because even without the charity industrial complex, there exists a phalanx of believers in the public service and human resource departments everywhere, most of whom are women. They will ensure these dangerous ideas live on within public and private institutions.
Also, even if, by some miracle, public funds for the rainbow racket should dry up, we now have a new source of moolah eager to fill the gap. This source is private funds donated by wealthy women. The transfer of wealth from well-heeled successful women to the charitable sector is a trend that has only just begun all over the Western world and is bound to accelerate as women continue to climb the professional and economic ladder.
Our own former Prime Minister Dame Jacinda Ardern was one of the first to benefit from this phenomenon. In 2024 she received $US20m (approx $NZ30m) from Melinda Gates (former wife of tech giant Bill Gates) which she has used to fund various women’s health projects in the Pacific.
New Zealand has its own growing cohort of affluent women. The most well-known is Dame Theresa Gattung, the former CEO of Telecom. With her sister, in 2022, she launched the Gattung Foundation, a multi-million-dollar charitable foundation focused on reducing inequality. A year earlier she had pledged and donated NZ$2.5 million (over 10 years, with potential to increase) to the Centre for Women Entrepreneurs to equip them for successful careers and address the gender investment gap.
To my knowledge, neither Gattung’s foundation nor Ardern’s have funded rainbow groups. But the Clare Foundation has and the Clare Foundation is flush with cash.
The Clare Foundation was founded in 2020 by Anna Margaret Clare Stuck. Stuck is the former partner of the man who is currently New Zealander of the Year, Sir Rod Drury. Drury is a tech entrepreneur primarily known for his association with cloud accounting software company, Xero.
In 2021, reports indicated that Drury and Stuck (via associated trusts) sold substantial Xero shares worth hundreds of millions of dollars (e.g., around A$300 million in one transaction). They share children and Stuck has cited her children as a key inspiration for her philanthropic work.
The Clare foundation was seeded with an interest-free loan of $34.8 million (as at 31 March 2021) from the Anna Margaret Clare Ventures Trust. Media at the time described it as a “$35 million charity” flush with cash that it planned to give away. In its first full year (ended 31 March 2021), total assets were approximately $34.6 million, almost entirely offset by the loan liability, with initial grants of $411,500.
The latest published annual report (March 2025) on the charities register reveals that the Clare Foundation now has total assets of $90.9 million including $33 million in quick access cash and investments and $57 million in longer-term investments. They “owe” $81.5 million to Stuck’s trust. This is how she funds the giving. After paying back what they owe, there’s $9.4 million of real net worth built up.
In the last year Clare earned $15.4 million total revenue, (mostly from investments and big founder injections) and spent $8.6 million (mostly $7.5 million in grants to causes), so they ended the year with a $6.9 million surplus – good for more future giving.
While it is not envisaged that the foundation will exist into perpetuity, there is no definitive end date. For investment and expenditure planning purposes, the time horizon of the foundation is intended to be 10 years.
The Clare Foundation has been described as a progressive philanthropic organisation and it lives up to this label by funding a raft of rainbow (LGBTQ+/queer) groups and initiatives.
In response to Covid-19 lockdowns, Clare provided funding to:
- RainbowYOUTH – for programmes supporting at-risk rainbow youth.
- InsideOUT – for similar youth wellbeing and inclusion work.
But these days Clare is an active member of the Rainbow Funders Rōpū (a collaborative group of about 10 New Zealand philanthropic funders focused on supporting rainbow and intersex communities and organisations).
Through the rōpū, Clare invests in the Rainbow Support Collective (RSC) – a peer-led network of rainbow organisations working together on shared wellbeing outcomes for alphabet people across New Zealand.
Key RSC member organisations include:
- RainbowYOUTH
- InsideOUT Kōaro
- Outline Aotearoa
- Gender Minorities Aotearoa
- Te Ngākau Kahukura
- Rainbow Hub Waikato
- Burnett Foundation Aotearoa
- Q Youth
- Dunedin Pride
- Qtopia
- Moana Vā
- Mana Tipua
- Auckland Pride
- Intersex Aotearoa
Clare works with other funders (e.g., Tindall Foundation, Foundation North) rather than funding individual organisations in isolation. No specific dollar amounts for rainbow grants are publicly broken out in recent reports, and they operate proactively (no unsolicited applications).
This latter insight tells me that Anna Stuck and co are members of the progressive elite, where cultural capital is expressed by performative caring for the vulnerable and minorities. They don’t need to request applications since they all know the ‘good people’ doing good things in society. These women truly believe their money, concerns and projects are improving the world. It will not be easy to persuade them otherwise.
This raises questions for those of us based in reality. Should we bother trying to convince these women they’re on the wrong track? If so – how? Their support could be hugely influential. Or is even thinking of attempting that a fool’s errand? Should we just forge ahead regardless?
This article was originally published on the author’s Substack.
