There’s nothing wrong with not being a feminist

It seems that refusing to use the F-word at work may cause more trouble than using it. A 50-year old Environment Agency manager found himself in front of an employment tribunal after claiming to have been sacked for calling himself a “non-feminist”.

Unfortunately for him, the tribunal found that his dismissal had nothing to do with this, his former employers arguing he’d actually been let go after moonlighting as a counsellor during working hours. Yet the tribunal did still pass comment on his thoughts on feminism, and the official verdict makes for alarming reading.

The court decided that non-feminist views were “questionable”, “not worthy of respect” or “compatible with human dignity” and could therefore be discriminatory to his colleagues. The manager had allegedly outed himself as a non-believer in Diversity, Equality and Inclusion policy when taking umbrage with what he described as an agenda to promote women over men.

Is it so wrong to reject feminism? If so, many more people may be in line for a judge’s ire. Back in 2016, a feminist organisation ran a poll on attitudes towards equality. This found that just 7 per cent of Britons would say they were a feminist, despite over two-thirds supporting equality between the sexes. The issue wasn’t a reactionary turn in the populace against women’s freedom and equality, but a problem with the F-word itself.

The Fawcett Society’s conclusion was that we were a “nation of hidden feminists” who didn’t really know what the word meant. Silly us. Hadn’t we listened to our betters? After all, just two years previously Ed Miliband, Nick Clegg and Harriet Harman had been snapped wearing “this is what a feminist looks like” t-shirts. Yet despite the patronising overtones of campaigning organisations, the disjunct between how people actually feel about women, and what feminism as a political movement now represents, remained.

I personally share the annoyance with corporate feminist quota-chasing. Contemporary feminism has become a middle-class girls’ club - a political movement for glass-ceiling-smashers who have little interest in the women working for a pittance to clean up the shards.

Take publications like The Authority Gap by Mary Ann Sieghart, an unrelentingly bourgeois analysis of women’s priorities, obsessed with CEO status and high society. The Sheryl Sandberg brand of whining professional feminism has won out – no wonder ordinary people are turning away from it.

These days, you can’t really be sure that feminism is even about women – after all, it’s taken several years and an official report from a paediatrician to get most politicians to admit that they do actually know what a woman is. Humza Yousaf, that great hero of women’s equality, has assured his trans fans that a new bill on misogyny will apply to “anyone”. What’s the point of a bill criminalising hatred against women if it can apply to men in dresses?

Whether the man in front of the tribunal was annoyed with contemporary feminism or a real woman hater is by the by. The tribunal judge’s remarks form the real insult. They suggest that DEI policy and officially enforced solidarity with feminism is all that stands between women and cavemen behaviour in the workplace.

On the contrary, it’s time to prick some of the egos in HR, where enforcers of our new morality believe that their zero-tolerance documents and equality laws have secured women’s freedom. On the contrary, as I wrote in my book – What Women Want: Fun, Freedom and an End to Feminism – top-down enforcement of social norms via equality law, protective legislation or overreach in workplace regulations hampers women’s fight for freedom. It places us as perpetual victims, in need of “respect” protected by interfering judges and paternalistic bosses.

There might be little worth saving in the feminist movement, but women’s freedom is an unresolved issue and one worth fighting for. From abortion rights to childcare provision, mounting pressure on mothers and parenting to remaining vestiges of sexist behaviour, there’s a lot to talk about. It would be better if we could discuss these issues openly without being expected to toe official lines.