Sorry, Real Housewives, but your victimhood game is up

The release this week of Lisa Wilkinson’s biography is a cue for sociologists to get to work. A new form of rent seeker has been identified.

Lisa Wilkinson and The Project co-host Hamish Macdonald.

The release this week of Lisa Wilkinson’s biography, It Wasn’t Meant To Be Like This, is a cue for sociologists to get to work. A new form of rent seeker has been ­identified. We will call them the Real Housewives of Mosman, and let sociologists conjure up their own term.

Inspired by Wilkinson, a resident of Sydney’s Lower North Shore who tried to leverage a few hundred grand out of Channel 9 by appealing to the gender wage gap, other Real Housewives are equally adept at climbing aboard a victim platform to snare money and status.

All over Mosman, and other moneyed postcodes where Manolo Blahniks are worn, women bored with their humdrum existence as executives two or three ­layers away from the chief executive seek the portfolio career. A few boards, nothing too taxing, and half a million a year. Or women barristers with middling practices who are sick of the brutal hours and client demands and yearn for an accelerated ride to the Bench with its status, judicial pension and freedom from pesky clients.

There are other forms of this species, sharing similar, and surprising, characteristics. They are mostly affluent and privileged, yet in today’s parlance they are self-described victims. They might not have seen a scintilla of discrimination in their own lives, indeed may have benefited from positive discrimination, but they are, by their own telling, the new oppressed.

How has this happened?

Feeble-minded men, like the now rebranded Male Champions of Change, are part of the answer. Whether out of collective guilt, fear of their womenfolk, or desire not to be excluded from dinner parties, some apparently smart men have fallen for outrageous leaps of logic, like the gender wage gap or the need for quotas.

Of course, for some of the more calculating men, solicitude for the plight of the Real Housewives is just a more modern pick-up line. Where once a bloke trying to portray sensitivity and intellect would pretend to have read Proust or Sylvia Plath, now they just bang on about the gender wage gap.

Credit must also be given where it is due. The Real Housewives have run a helluva marketing campaign and have leveraged their ­political clout magnificently.

Sometimes the victim stuff backfires, as it did with Dianne ­Jolley, the former University of Technology Sydney dean of science who was busted for faking a hate-mail campaign against herself and was last week convicted of causing financial disadvantage by deception.

But the campaign of playing victim in a bad-boy world kicks on, regardless of small snags – like facts. In a speech to mark her new role as president of the NSW Law Society, Juliana Warner spoke about that wicked decade, the 1980s, when she began her career, It was, she said, a pretty challenging time for women in the profession: “In general, we were paid less; we were regarded as ‘not ­committed’ to our careers when we had children; and we weren’t given the equivalent opportunities to those given to male colleagues. Back then we didn’t speak about unconscious bias because there was nothing unconscious about it.”

Warner also praised her own law firm, formerly Freehill, Hollingdale and Page, now called Herbert Smith Freehills, as one with “very high standards” in its legal work and its ethical conduct.

So where was the hotbed of conscious bias that Warner talks about? It would be helpful, especially from a lawyer, to lay out clear evidence of the evil 80s when law firms apparently practised conscious bias.

Law Society of NSW President Juliana Warner.

As Margaret Thatcher famously said, give me their names. Who are these wicked firms, or the terrible men who treated women in this way?

Without a firm grasp on detail, the effect is to taint the entire ­profession. Not a very evidence-based approach.

I worked at Freehills as a young lawyer in the 80s, among a large group of new graduates of whom half, or near half, were women. I don’t recall a single gripe, conversation or even a passing aside from any of the women I worked with about pay gaps, being treated differently, or not being given the same opportunities. We worked hard, played hard, and, looking back, it was liberating not to spend a part of each day moaning about being a woman.

One wonders how much work the Housewives of Victimhood can get done when they spend so much time playing the downtrodden sex. One thing is clear: they don’t spend much time amassing real evidence.

And to their credit, their confected campaign of victimhood has succeeded beyond expectations. Not only have ASX 100 boards got to 30 per cent of women quicker than expected, but it is now de ­rigueur for corporates to aim for 50/50 gender representation at senior levels (or 40-40-20 for those more sensitive to the number of genders out there). Bonuses get paid for meeting these targets, ­irrespective of the composition of the candidate pool.

On paper, a 50/50 gender split sounds entirely fair. Dig deeper and the injustice is clear. We have seen the absurd results that occur when you quarantine 50 per cent of the places for a candidate pool of 25 per cent. In the mining industry this has led to the situation where, on average, women are appointed to their first managerial roles at 42, while men had to wait until they were, on average, 51.

So now we arrive at the real questions. Having a bit of fun at the expense of the Real Housewives is all very well, but are these trends good for society? Are we helping the right people, in the right way, and at the right time?

Quotas and wage-gap campaigns sound terrific, but there is a good argument they are divisive, pay little or no regard to what women really want, and don’t help the average woman much. Sceptics are entitled to ask, as Johannes Leak did in a legendary cartoon last week, whether privileged women like the Real Housewives have hijacked these issues for their own benefit while leaving genuinely oppressed women to suffer. Moreover, these confected victimhood campaigns do clearly hurt categories of men who don’t ­deserve to be hurt.

Johannes Leak

For example, while the push to get women on boards has been ­terrific for a cadre of already privileged women, a better start would have been to find out why women are still going into legal or HR roles rather than finance or line management, and then work out how to equalise the pipeline, voluntarily, at the intake point.

A bottom-up, and voluntary, campaign is likely to have yielded a much better result than a coercive campaign starting at the top end. It would, however, have taken a long time, required lots of work, and not looked after the Housewives fast enough, or well enough.

Moreover, is the coercive quota approach good for society? What is the moral justification for promoting from this cohort of affluent Housewives instead of promoting working-class boys? Newcastle was once a company town where an ambitious but poor young man could perhaps become a manager at BHP at 42. Now a sensible ­Newcastle mother would have to advise her son not to join BHP under any circumstances, because he will be passed over for at least a decade by women who may or may not match his talents, skills and ­experience.

Like most central planning efforts to regulate the allocation of scarce resources in ways perceived by the planners to be socially desirable, one distortion usually produces an equal and opposite one. Hence, talent and capital are ­flowing out of listed and regulated markets into start-ups, private ventures and lightly regulated areas.

Don’t go to BHP, son, head off into private equity or venture capital. These trends can take a long while to become obvious, but they are starting to emerge now and could soon become a tsunami. Sydney Airport isn’t the first, and won’t be the last, business to be more desirable and valuable in private hands than in public ones.

At bottom, the best allocation of scarce resources is on a strictly meritocratic basis. Just as Martin Luther King wanted his children to be judged on content of character and not skin colour, society is richest in every sense when we refuse to reward special pleading by any identity characteristic. Sorry Housewives, you’ll have to compete on merit, not on victimhood.