Hello I tried to keep the title pretty short and to the point, I couldn’t find an advice flair so I had decided to label it as “discrimination” as this is what this post is going to be about.

Now I am unsure if this will even be allowed here so please bare with me I am still new to the sub and couldn’t find anything in the rules against these kind of posts, so I won’t be surprised if my post gets deleted etc.

To start off I have decided to have a change in my career this year and after finishing college I had decided to get into teaching. Now in the UK at the very least it’s quite easy to become a teacher or a TA with all sorts of different companies and schools offering train as you work programmes.

So I applied around a week ago and got an instant reply from the training manager at a local school, like I’m not even joking it was literally like an hour after I applied. For the sake of the post I’ll refer to her as H. Now H seemed over the moon with my application and qualifications speaking quite highly of me and couldn’t wait for me to come down and have a formal interview to discuss things further, assuring that this is only so I get to meet the staff and the students, sort of a very relaxed informal interview sort of thing.

I get there yesterday around 15 minutes early and make my way towards the school reception. Prior to me coming in I spoke to H earlier that morning about the interview and she was still very happy about me coming. Now this will change drastically. I come through the door and introduce myself to the receptionist and other members of staff as I begin signing in. Then I’m informed that there will be another trainee coming along today who I’ll call J and H should be down shortly. After around 30 minutes of waiting in the waiting room it was about 10 o’clock although the interview was meant to start at 9:20. H comes in along with J, both introduced themselves to me but H’s behaviour had suddenly dropped from very positive to almost rude and mean.

I didn’t think much of it just thought maybe the traffic was bad and that as they both came on the bus they must have been stranded in the traffic. But I could see the first signs of unequal treatment right away, H would not look at me or speak to me just left me to follow them two around. After a short tour of the school we were told that we are going to take a small informal assessment so that H will be able to make the right decision in wether we suit this job or not. And this is when I started to get a bit confused because over the course of about a week H did not tell me about any sort of assessment, but she happily told J and even gave her resources in order to get prepared for the test.

And this is when the whole thing starts to unravel. As we’re sitting the test H sits beside J and basically fills it out for her by guiding her through it. I thought well that’s not really fair but whatever maybe she needs help for whatever reason. But the thing is H gave her all the right answers literally right in front of me, and yes we had different tests to one another.

I thought right, still keeping quiet and just filling it all out anyway. Then as soon as J is half way through her test and I’m nearly finished H decided that we need to go into the classroom and interact with kids. I got told that before I came so I prepared myself mentally for that anyway.

We walk into the classroom and meet the two teachers that were present and three TAs, to my surprise though I’ve been in that school for about an hour and a half now and I have not seen a single male until I walked into this classroom and “coincidentally” the one male TA had the same surname as the headteacher, keep that in mind for now.

So we get told we are going to get small groups of children and interact with them on a few tasks alongside a teacher present and H observing us. And this is where I thought to myself, she’s gonna do something shitty again. And to my demise she assigned a group of 10 seven year olds to me and 2 to J. I guess you can see where that is going don’t you.

Also she assigned 2 teachers to sit with J while she interacted with the kids and one TA with me. I’m thinking why not it’s always a challenge isn’t it. But then to my shock and obviously the biggest sign of H being a shitty person. She assigned 10 girls to me, again keep that in the back of your mind for now.

So we get them settled and I’ve decided to go with some reading can’t go wrong with that can you, and it was at this point the male TA came over and decided to sit with us whispering to me “watch your back mate H is up to something”. So I continued to interact with the kids asking them questions getting them involved with the books, and to both TAs surprise I got one of the girls to actually interact and play with other kids as no one could do before. She is not from the UK and suffers from autism of some sort and has been hard work ever since she came but I think because I am from her country too she got involved. The kids were really good as the male TA said way too good for someone new. I’ve worked with children and young adults in a psychiatric setting before so I know how to professionally interact with kids.

I’ve gotten praises from all the teachers and even the headteacher was really impressed with me. We end up finishing the class off and go back into the empty classroom to finish off the test and get things moving with everything. But I’ve noticed something, J was using a blue pen to start off with but half of her test was written in red ink and in scribbly writing the writing of H. When H went to get our documents scanned J actually noticed what’s going on and apologised and said she’s going to have a word with H because she though that H was helping me out too and treating me equally. I told her it is funny how H keeps looking at me like I am a child predator of some sort and keeps a very mean tone when she talks to me.

J agreed and we both proceeded to finish off the test to which H came in not even 2 minutes after she left and just took the test off of me and said “that’s enough, you can go now I’ll call you later to inform you about what’s going on next” meanwhile she’s let J finish hers off calmly without interruption. On my way out I asked the receptionist if I could speak to the headmistress and to my surprise even she saw what H is doing, she has told me that for the three years she’s worked here for the hiring team only her son got hired, no other male has worked there since and that she sees Hs’ discriminative behaviour towards men but she can’t do anything about it because no one speaks up. She said that she would really like to see me working here as I seem like a good person but she warned me that I will be lucky to get through with H on board. And even if I do get hired H will make sure to make my life a living hell as she had done with other male members of staff.

I go home and go about my day as usual and I get a phone call from no other than H. Low and behold this is exactly word to word that she had said to me on the phone;

“Hello -, it’s H from - school we met earlier today about your training and employment offer. Both staff and I are very pleased with you but I cannot allow you to continue your progress with the employment at the minute” - side note this is exactly what she said, the phone was on speaker with me and my girlfriend in the room.

“Although I can offer you a volunteering deal where you will be able to work with us for the next year and then I will review your employment offer again. The reasoning behind this is” and I fucking quote

“Because you’re a man you are more prone to safeguarding issues and we do not want that in our school...” I cut her off there and just exploded.

Me - “Look H, I get it you had your mind made up as soon as I walked through the door, you favoured J all along and helped her out with something that you shouldn’t have helped her with. You tried to set me up putting me with all the girls hoping I mess something up meanwhile you put J with two kids and two teachers to support her. Even the TAs you put me with said that it is not fair. You rushed me off not allowing me to finish my test so you can back yourself up on why you backed out the employment offer. And speaking of kids each one of your members of staff praised me for the work I had done with them today, especially with - as no one was able to work with her as she just refused to. So no I do not want your offer”

To which she replied with - “I am sorry but what you are saying is wrong I did not do any of that, and I have heard you spoke to the headmistress about it which is something I am not happy about. But if you may re think my offer...” that’s when I just cut her off and called it a day.

Now I know this is probably some whining to anyone but to me it is an actual issue. This person disallows male staff to work as they are I guess a threat to her. Since then I applied for other positions and even exchanged a few emails with the headmistress of the school to get the whole thing reported to the higher higher ups. I feel like this could mean something bad for me though as I spoke to my girlfriend and we both said that she could ruin my career with the amount of power that she has. Because it’s important to note she isn’t just in charge of that school it’s many schools in the area. And it is also important to note I worked with kids before, I have a clean DBS from just two weeks ago. In no means I am a predator or someone who treats others badly etc. So she didn’t even have a ground for her behaviour towards me.

This whole thing was just messed up I’m just sad that I wasted my time and air for that woman, she should not be in the position that she is in.

Thanks for anyone reading though any advice relating the matter would be amazing. Thanks.

TD;IL - Sexist employer discriminated me cause I was a man trying to do anything so I mess up and she can continue to have her ruling in a school only hiring and prioritising women.