First time posting here, and don’t think I ever would, but experienced an interesting level of discrimination that I didn’t realize existed.

I work at a company that is known for its inclusive culture. It has a female CEO and about 70% of the leadership team is women. The rest is about 50/50. I recently started at this company and I tend to do Movember every year given that one of my best friends in high school committed suicide due to the abusive home he came from.

After one week when my mustache became noticeable I already received responses. People noticed and one woman told me I looked right winged (Hitler reference) even though it’s a neatly normal kept moustache and looks nothing like it. Nor do I have conservative views in general. Others responded to me more distant than I was used to.

This week we had an informal monthly meeting where every month a different topic is discussed and this time it was about problems affecting males as it was on international men’s day. We were broken up in three categories as work groups to think about three predominantly male problems namely homelessness, suicide, and juridical inequality. Once returned we had to present what we came up with.

The juridical group came back with men getting sentenced 60% more harshly for their crimes as they’re perceived to be more violent. “Jokingly” people said they were, and I just thought to myself: “Imagine jokingly saying that when it’s about racial juridical inequality, people would get fired”. When paternity fraud was brought up (purposefully pretending that someone is the biological father when he’s not) it was laughed at and not really taken seriously.

But what stung most is that when the suicide issue came up, the woman presenting it back to the group said it was because men try to act like the breadwinner and take positions they can’t handle. That men tend to act like they have super powers, and then jokingly followed with that’s only women that have super powers, and they should leave this positions to them. It felt like some power hungry mongrel who was trying to rise the ranks and telling men not to try and compete.

Suicide is most common in adolescents. They don’t worry about being the breadwinner or having super powers. They tend to use more violent means than women hence they die more from their attempts. In addition they feel isolated and not taken seriously. I was shocked. Even consider making a complaint given that is the conclusion they came to.