Patriarchy Inc.

If you remember my report on the Hay Literary Festival you will know that I saw Cordelia Fine being interviewed about her latest book, Patriarchy Inc.. Fine is one of my favourite feminist writers, and this book looked to engage directly with my work because it is all about the DEI industry. I have finally got around to reading it.

Patriarchy Inc. is, sadly, a book that suffers from terrible timing. When it was written, the diversity industry was in full flow. Fine comments at one point that it was predicted to be worth $24.4 billion by 2030. But by the time it was published DEI was already coming under attack from the Tangerine Tyrant in the White House. As I write this, he has declared that practicing DEI is a breach of human rights, presumably the right to hate and oppress anyone who is not white, straight, able-bodied, male and nominally Christian.

Consequently Fine’s book comes across as aiming a peashooter at a target that is getting the full force of an assault rifle to the face.

Whether that matters or not is a different question, because the main thrust of Fine’s argument is that DEI hasn’t worked, does not work, and will probably never work. And that is something that should concern all of us who still believe in promoting equality.

Much of the book is devoted to explaining how attempts to promote diversity, equality and inclusion in the workplace have been misguided. Some of this is fairly obvious. Equality programmes that tell women that they are not behaving in the right way in the work environment, or that they need ‘fixing’ in some way, are essentially victim blaming.

Equally initiatives to ‘fix’ men won’t work if they are superficial and don’t address the underlying issues. For example, giving men the right to maternity leave changes nothing if the men are all afraid to take it in case doing so damages their careers.

Sometimes the problem is more subtle. Some DEI promoters have identified that women prefer to work with female mentors. They are much less likely to suffer casual sexism, or sexual harassment, that way. But if the workplace environment already privileges men over women then anyone with a female mentor will do less well than someone with a male mentor, and soon people start drawing the erroneous conclusion that women make bad mentors.

Fine also holds that some diversity training is counter-productive. Training that tells white, middle-class people that they all suffer from unconscious bias and need to change their bad behaviour is probably not going to go down well with a lot of the class.

The real problem, however, is money. The modern work environment in Western countries is geared to produce exactly one thing, regardless of what industry you are in. It is a vehicle for producing shareholder value. Nothing else matters. This is disastrous for a whole number of reasons, but from a DEI point of view it means that those at the top of the tree, who are overwhelmingly white men, and who are incentivised to produce shareholder value by being paid in stock, have no interest in the wellbeing of their employees or the long term future of the company for which they work. They just want to squeeze as much value out of it as possible and then move on to the next victim.

Along the way we are treated to some classic examples of Fine’s acerbic wit. She reserves her most pointed shots for evolutionary psychologists, which makes me very happy. She also managed to dig up this fabulous quote:

No society can surely be flourishing and happy of which the far greater part of the members are poor and miserable.

That’s from a little book called An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes if the Wealth of Nations, by a fellow called Adam Smith. You may have heard of it.

Fine has a bunch of suggestions in the final chapter for how we can effect real change in society and the workplace. But the real problem is that our society is obsessed with gender differences, and this obsession is baked into children at a very early age. We (by which I mean Western society, because folks in the parts of the world we colonized did not always share our weird social ideas) have been fighting this gender war at least since the fall of the Old Babylonian Empire. Stopping that happening is going to take more than a few government initiatives and workplace training programmes.

Title: Patriarchy Inc.
By: Cordelia Fine
Publisher: Atlantic Books
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
Bookshop.org UK
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