An Australian man finally land a job after four months of unemployment, but only because he added the title, “Mr” to his resume.
Kim O’Grady, who is a management consultant in Perth, Australia, finally decided to inform the companies he was applying for positions with that he was a man after he repeatedly received rejection letter after rejection letter.
O’Grady decided to document his attempt to find employment by writing a Tumblr blog. On Sunday he wrote an epilogue to his original post, entitled, How I Discovered Gender Discrimination, which divulges every detail on his discovery of sexism in the work place.
He wrote, “The sad reality is this shows we all know how real and invasive sexism is. People have expressed sadness, disappointment, anger, but no man or woman has expressed disbelief.”
O’Grady then added, “I have also not seen a single example of anyone declaring that my story is only relevant to my local experience as an Australian. It’s been shared widely throughout the USA, Canada and the UK, and I have even seen a few links from outside the anglosphere. Yet everywhere it is greeted with knowing assent.”
O’Grady looked for clues as to why, despite the fact that he is an experienced engineer and salesman, he couldn’t find himself a job.
He then spotted that he had placed is name in the perfect position on his CV to “make it instantly recognisable,” which in the process was immediately ruining his chances of finding employment with anyone who read it.
O’Grady wrote, “My first name is Kim. Technically its gender neutral but my experience showed that most people’s default setting in the absence of any other clues is to assume Kim is a women’s name. And nothing else on my CV identified me as male
He continued, “At first I thought I was being a little paranoid but engineering, trades, sales and management were all definitely male dominated industries. So I pictured all the managers I had over the years and, forming an amalgam of them in my mind, I read through the document as I imagined they would have. It was like being hit on the head with a big sheet of unbreakable glass ceiling.”
Do you think sexism is still prominent in today’s society?
[Image via Meetup]