Australian Kim flooded with job offers after adding ‘Mr’ to CV
19 July 2013
An Australian man with the unisex forename Kim, surname O’Grady, found he was suddenly given several job offers, four months into a draining job search, after adding the word ‘Mr.’ in front of his name on his CV.
Fri, 19 Jul 2013
An Australian man with the unisex forename Kim, surname O’Grady, found he was suddenly given several job offers, four months into a draining job search, after adding the word ‘Mr.’ in front of his name on his CV.
The management consultant blogged about the experience of a job search back in the 1990s on his tumblr account in a post entitled ‘How I Discovered Gender Discrimination’.
Kim had also put the fact of being married and having two children on his CV, “because I knew many employers would see it as showing stability.
He continues: “But when I viewed it through the skewed view of middle aged men who thought I was a woman, I could see it was just further damning my cause.
“I doubt if many of the managers I had known would have made it to the second page.”
When he added the masculine title to his CV, he got an interview for the next two jobs he applied for – taking one of them against what he calls “a very competitive shortlist”.
In O’Grady’s own words the story went “unexpectedly viral” and attracted international media attention. He has since written an ‘Epilogue’ to the original post, which concludes: “Gender discrimination is real and it damages women, and removing gender discrimination needs leadership from men. It needs men who are not afraid to sacrifice their own artificial privilege in order to achieve genuine and equal rights for all.”
An Australian man with the unisex forename Kim, surname O’Grady, found he was suddenly given several job offers, four months into a draining job search, after adding the word ‘Mr.’ in front of his name on his CV.
The management consultant blogged about the experience of a job search back in the 1990s on his tumblr account in a post entitled ‘How I Discovered Gender Discrimination’.
Kim had also put the fact of being married and having two children on his CV, “because I knew many employers would see it as showing stability.
He continues: “But when I viewed it through the skewed view of middle aged men who thought I was a woman, I could see it was just further damning my cause.
“I doubt if many of the managers I had known would have made it to the second page.”
When he added the masculine title to his CV, he got an interview for the next two jobs he applied for – taking one of them against what he calls “a very competitive shortlist”.
In O’Grady’s own words the story went “unexpectedly viral” and attracted international media attention. He has since written an ‘Epilogue’ to the original post, which concludes: “Gender discrimination is real and it damages women, and removing gender discrimination needs leadership from men. It needs men who are not afraid to sacrifice their own artificial privilege in order to achieve genuine and equal rights for all.”
