There are no rules — and should be no judgement — about how International Women's Day should be marked.

Not everyone's a fan of pink cupcakes and special breakfasts full of women who are a little bit crying on the inside from having to get it together even earlier than usual.

Some ladies contain themselves to the quiet ritual of doing one and a half times as much housework as their husbands, just like every other day.

As Donald Trump and his 'broligarchs' take over, reality disappears from conversations on gender and diversity

That said, I think we can agree that America's IWD 2025 game plan is a departure from form.

10am: Build giant pile of workplace pro-equality programs out by the lake house.

11am: Torch it while Elon Musk fires multiple AK-47s into the air, screaming "Merit For Ever!" while in a nearby hut, an employee delivers his 14th child.

1pm: Fight Club in the Oval Office, in which a confirmed draft-dodger and a guy who was a press secretary in the Marines double-team a third guy who is fighting an actual war right now, while reporters razz him about his outfit.

Sunset: Pig hunting with Mark Zuckerberg.

US President Donald Trump has outlawed diversity and inclusion programs across the US in what he described (with customary self-effacement) as "the most important federal civil rights measure in decades".

Appointments in the US will henceforth be made on merit, or — in the case of the executive order concerning the Department of Defense — "merit and lethality".

This may explain why the Senate confirmation hearings for Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, whose previous gig was weekend-hosting Fox & Friends, included an inquiry as to how many push-ups he could do.

"I did five sets of 47 [Trump is the 47th president] this morning," Hegseth replied, adding — as would any accountability-minded preschooler — "My brother saw it."

Fortune 500 companies have adopted the president's DEI death sentence with remarkable speed.

Forbes magazine has been monitoring the daily deletions of diversity targets from top-end corporate bumf and reports that in recent weeks Goldman Sachs, Paramount, Bank of America, BlackRock and Citigroup joined the exodus.

Even Pepsi — known for making a multi-million-dollar woke goose of itself with Kendall Jenner in 2017 — is "transitioning" its chief diversity officer to "a broader role".

And on Saturday, as the schoolboy fight video from the Oval Office metastasised across the globe, Forbes reported that Manhattan asset management firm Slate Street was the latest quiet abandoner of gender and ethnicity targets.

Why is this especially interesting? Well, because for International Women's Day in 2017, during Donald Trump's first term, Slate Street commissioned and installed the now-famous "Fearless Girl", a four-foot bronze statue of a pig-tailed lass staring down the NY Stock Exchange, which the company extolled as an artistic manifestation of its commitment to diversity.

The Fearless Girl's plinth bears an exhortation to "Know the power of women in leadership," confirming her status for Slate Street circa 2025 as "110kg of regrettable tattoo".

And look — something had to give, to be fair.

In the recently concluded era when diversity and inclusion were cool, the male ranks of CEOs among America's 500 biggest companies fell to a frightening low of 90 per cent. There were even, at one point in 2023, nine African American CEOs in that hallowed number.

But it was more than that.

Meta chief Mark Zuckerberg told podcaster Joe Rogan, in a three-hour January exchange much occupied with mixed martial arts and the merits of bows and arrows while hunting pigs, that business leadership in the DEI age had starved itself of masculine energy.

"I do think the corporate culture sort of had swung towards being this somewhat more neutered thing and I didn't really feel that until I got involved in martial arts," he mused. "You have to be at least somewhat aggressive, yeah."

As Prospect editor Alan Rusbridger (an amateur pianist gamely overcoming what we might term the "mandicap" of his own gentle hobby) translated from the Zuckerbergese: "What Mark is saying is that the pendulum has swung too far and it's time for blokes to be able to talk about whether Arsenal needs a new striker PDQ first thing in the morning without feeling they're about to be reported by the diversity, equality and inclusion team. Which, in Meta's case, Mark has just fired."

The uptick in showy displays of aggression and "masculine energy" across the heavyweight section of America's tycoon community is undeniable since Trump's return to power.

What is truly fascinating, though, is that behind such hysterical braggadocio lies the truth of what these putative alpha males are doing. Which is: engaging in the most obsequious display of brown-nosing and forelock-tugging available on God's green earth, with the possible exception of North Korea.

What is the chicken here, and what is the egg?

Does the Trump ascendancy formally liberate the C-suite cavemen who were hiding under their desks this whole time?

Or are these urgent new corporate hobbies (mixed martial arts, belchin', fartin', scratchin', hog-shootin') just the best roll of the dice for a broligarch all too whimperingly aware that his day job right now is to abase himself completely among the cheeseburger wrappers at the feet of a 78-year-old reality TV star?

Let's turn to Australia, where a good number of the multinationals scrambling to unhitch the DEI wagon still have certain reporting and disclosure obligations under Australian law.

And where opposition leader Dutton — like Trump — has accumulated a significant surge in support among young men.

A consolidated Freshwater poll published by the Australian Financial Review last month found that among men aged 18 to 34, Dutton was supported by 37 per cent, while only 27 per cent of young women shared their enthusiasm.

Dutton's public commentary has been much milder than Trump's, and he has firmly discouraged various of his more excitable Coalition colleagues — for now at least — from galloping off on the kinds of pro-life and anti-trans crusades that the US president harnessed profitably in his campaign.

It was shadow Finance Minister Jane Hume, not Dutton, who yesterday announced the Coalition's policy to force public servants back to the office five days a week, a move whose impact is expected to disadvantage women more than men.

But he absolutely associates himself with the sentiment that men are "fed up" with diversity initiatives in their workplaces.

"I think a lot of young males feel disenfranchised and feel ostracised," the opposition leader told businessman and podcaster Mark Bouris in January.

"They're pushing back and saying, 'Well, why am I being overlooked at work for a job, you know, three jobs running when I've got, you know, a partner at home, and she's decided to stay at home with three young kids, and I want a promotion at work so that I can help pay the bills at home,' and so I think all of that has morphed."

Bouris is best known (apart from his TV and podcasting commitments) as a company chairman. Peter Dutton is the leader of the Liberal Party.

Across the ASX200, Bouris's type of job is held 87 per cent of the time by men. And Dutton's job has never — in 80 years of the Liberal Party's existence — been held by a woman.

It's hard to imagine that either man would ever argue that they had been, in their careers, professionally thwarted by women.

This is not to suggest, however, that the sentiment the pair discussed on the podcast is imaginary or made-up. It's very real, widespread, and now very clearly having an effect on voting intention among young men.

In her new book Patriarchy Inc, the Melbourne-based psychologist, neuroscientist and philosopher Cordelia Fine cites recent research indicating that just over half of Australian professional men feel they suffer from reverse discrimination.

In France, she writes, this view is shared by 46 per cent of men. In Great Britain, 59 per cent.

Does the feeling square with reality?

Well. Yesterday's annual WGEA gender pay gap report found that the average pay gap between men and women in Australia continues to hover around 21 per cent.

This does not mean employers are paying a man more than they pay a woman doing the exact same job. That's been illegal for decades. The disparity arises from the fact that women on average are more likely to be doing the less well-paid jobs, and men the better-paid ones.

In other words, the WGEA figures are a clear demonstration that one gender is indeed being more regularly passed over for promotions to better-paying jobs in Australia, and it's not men. It's still women, just like most years.

So what's caused this feeling among young men?

A couple of theories.

First: Girls generally outperform boys at Year 12, with a couple of subject exceptions. And females have been completing graduate degrees at Australian universities in greater numbers than males for decades.

The gender inequities in Australian workplaces don't really kick in until people start having kids, when women are more likely to leave the workforce for a bit, and then get paid a bit less than they're worth when they get back and miss out on promotions and bonuses and professional opportunities than men their age are more likely to enjoy interruptedly.

But a young man looking at his comparably-aged female colleague doesn't see that, and why would he? Humans always evaluate situations from their own perspective and life experience, especially when that experience has been a relatively comfortable or unchallenged one.

Second: If he's a decent chap who would never think of sexually harassing someone, he might also feel affronted by workplace campaigns that are designed to protect women (who are disproportionately more likely to be on the receiving end of such misbehaviour).

Third: While there is much hot air wasted on "identity politics", the truth is that most politics concerns identity. It's just less visible when the identity concerned matches your own.

The assessment implicit in Dutton's words, for instance — that a young father of three with a stay-at-home spouse should not be passed over for promotion at work — is its own form of identity politics.

It's clear that the opposition leader has met such a young man and remembered him because the unfairness of that particular story chimed with him.

A female politician might — influenced by her own life experience and those of her friends — be more likely to summon the story of an older woman attempting to resume her career after her children were grown, being passed over because her "career breaks" rendered her professional experience invalid.

That happens a lot too.

All of us, as humans, view the world through the prescription lenses of our own backgrounds and identities.

It's a factory defect in our design, and one that leads to great confusion, grief and damage. It would be amazing if we could all get better at taking the specs off now and again and having a squint through someone else's.

But until then, the best way around the problem is to make sure there's a decent variety of views in the room.

Especially when we're making big decisions.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-03-05/trump-oligarchs-masculinity/105009952

Real Men Don't Eat Quiche is a best-selling tongue-in-cheek book satirizing stereotypes of masculinity by the American screenwriter and humorist Bruce Feirstein, published in 1982 (ISBN 0-671-44831-5).[1]

The title alludes to the gender associations of quiche as a "feminine" food in American culture, which causes men to avoid it[2] and has served as the basis of the title of multiple journal articles.[3][4][5] To gain free publicity the publisher sent copies of the book to radio personalities and newspaper columnists, and the witty "real men don't ..." definitions were widely quoted. Listeners and readers then bought the book for more of the definitions.[6]

The book was on The New York Times Best Seller list for 55 weeks and sold over 1.6 million copies. An Australian adaptation by Alex Buzo was published later that year.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real_Men_Don%27t_Eat_Quich

YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT.

         Gus Leonisky

         POLITICAL CARTOONIST SINCE 1951.