Research

• your research proposal has been overlooked for support by your university

• initial support for your research ambitions/projects have later been withdrawn

• you have found it hard to attract PhD students to supervise, or early career and established researchers to collaborate with

• you have been lumped with teaching or administrative loads that limit research opportunity, and find it hard to say no to them

• you can’t understand how ‘big women on campus’ escape heavy teaching loads, secretly think they would be bad teachers anyway, and wonder if you would be rewarded for your bad teaching with more research opportunity

• your Head of Department always sends emails celebrating the success of women recipients of research grants but has sometimes missed yours and other men you work with

• you have seen your Head of Department give preferential treatment to women including in informal intellectual conversations, introductions to like-minded others of influence, and investment in research skill development

• the ‘research’ component of all staff on ‘teaching focused’ work profiles was changed to ‘scholarship of learning and teaching’ without consultation with individuals about their research interests and ambitions, to reduce the number of staff in the department who might otherwise appear not ‘research active’

• your work has been overly scrutinised compared to the work of female colleagues, or its validity questioned because of perceptions it is not empirically rigorous

• your academic wife has prestige and seniority in your academic collaborations

• you have had ‘good enough’/publishable articles repeatedly rejected, for reasons that sound more like a line (e.g. “it is outside the journal’s scope” when it’s clearly not)

• you often have to remind conference organisers to invite at least some male keynote speakers

• you have experienced serious delays in the execution of contracts and therefore payment for services or royalties for no real good reason

• you have found it hard to get funding for conferences or other networking and professional development opportunities

• you are self-funding more parts of your job than you have received funding support from your university for, and which you cannot afford to meet your work milestones/expectations

• you know of women colleagues whose applications for sabbatical have been approved or even multiple times, yet yours has not been approved once despite being eligible and/or overdue

• your economic benefit to the university, through international networking that enhances research grant success, was not prioritised in your application for sabbatical due to the disruption it would cause to caring responsibilities, so was not approved

• you partly sole publish due to low opportunity to collaborate or because of scholarly alienation, but are then criticised as being too independent, with concerns raised about your ability to work as part of a team

• you find rejections of your articles hard because they confirm your ‘imposter syndrome’

• you have thought about using a less masculine more androgynous or feminine version of your name to increase chances of getting published

• your PhD supervisor kept recommending women scholars to read and cite

• you work in a ‘hostile climate’ resistant to hearing and respecting your knowledge, or are presumed incompetent and have to prove otherwise over and over, not just to journal editors, PhD supervisors, and other seniors but students too, and see the opposite patterns for women you work with

Teaching

• you notice that whenever staff go on leave, their teaching load typically goes to men

• your university has a pattern of giving courses with high student enrolments to the new male staff - naïve, and eager to please and make a good first impression - but women just starting the job tend to be eased into high student loads

• your impression is that the cyberbullying of staff by students on anonymous evaluation surveys is worse for men than women

• you provide pastoral care for students and support to colleagues that goes unrecognised in work allocation models, and feel emotionally drained by your work

• your teaching evaluation scores are considered ‘true data’, compared to the positive qualitative comments received

• you notice that students often drop by your and other’s men’s doors for a chat or advice, but not so much the women you work with; while affirming of their trust in you, you feel pressured to work with an ‘open door policy’ which interrupts your ‘writing flow’

• students come to you more often than women colleagues with serious problems like domestic violence, sexual assault, miscarriage, poverty, racism, threat of homelessness, homophobic discrimination, etc.

• you feel deskilled by the repetitive nature of teaching and marking, and denied ‘a seat at the table’ to more interesting opportunities

• students have made hurtful comments or other “micro” aggressions to your face, in emails, or in anonymous evaluation surveys aimed to ‘put you back in your place’

• you teach subjects within disciplines that are gendered, and therefore likely to be controversial or divisive, so struggle to attract teaching and course evaluation scores that reflect your hard work, care and effort, practice wisdom and lived experience, high quality teaching materials, and promotion of pedagogy

• your perceived credibility and authority are publicly challenged, such as requests for re-grading assessments in front of other students

Promotion and pay

• you are a workhorse, but regularly see women climb the ranks with greater ease having done less

• you feel sheepish asking for advice about predatory journals or conferences in case it affirms perceptions you will always need a senior mentor

• you feel uncomfortable being asked who you mentor because you treat everyone as an intellectual equal and trust they do good work given they have passed the rigours of a PhD program

• you feel that no matter how excellent your track record of achievements are, there’s always ‘something’ you could or should have done better; if you get too close to the carrot, the carrot moves

• you regularly see women get promoted for ‘talking the talk’, but they don’t really have the goods to back it up

• you are often advised to just be selfish or act like a woman if you want to get promoted, and part-envy part-resent the power, status, privilege, funding, influence, rewards, and opportunities that come with higher academic titles

• you find the process of applying for promotion harrowing

• you speak modestly about your achievements

• you have shaky professional confidence because of your long history of being ignored, discouraged, or discounted

• you avoid senior positions because of friendships you might lose

• you see women apply for promotion when they only meet half the criteria, but their confidence in their abilities gets them the promotion

• you avoid promotion so that others don’t see you as scheming, ruthless, or ‘an honorary woman’ [14]

• you are so put off by how hard it was to be recognised for Senior Lecturer or Associate Professor that you have already decided not to bother going any further; with long thought-through bitter sweetness, selling yourself short has become the better option for your overall personal health

• you rarely receive external job offers compared to women you hear about, but are uncomfortable with using it as a career-enhancing tactic and do not have geographic mobility due to caring anyway

• you have accepted career demotions while relocating to support your wife’s career progression, and have accepted the first offer of employment you could get and not bargained for a higher salary or rank

• (excluding those strategically given to meet target quotas) you have seen opportunities such as appointments or promotions go to women when you just knew you were better placed to get them because of your knowledge and expertise

• you are all too familiar with metaphors like ‘chilly climate’, ‘leaky pipeline’, ‘glass ceilings’, ‘sticky floors’, ‘storming the tower’, ‘ivory basement’, ‘Mathew/Matilda effect’, and ‘black hole’ [15]

• you were informally acknowledged of your worth but told that due to rules about how the job was advertised you can only be offered the top step of a lower level, and was assured promotion to the correct level would be quick

• you have become aware of a woman colleague offered a non-transparent loading for temporarily taking on higher roles or duties despite having more qualifications and experience than her

• you have not moved academic levels for years, sometimes decades, at a time

• your parents don’t support your career progression as much as your sisters’

• you feel your workplace assumes you are not the or equal breadwinner of your household

• your position is financially insecure

• the catch cry ‘same work, same pay’ resonates with you

• you have been paid less than a woman colleague you know despite having similar qualifications and experience

• women you work with regularly name drop people with power they know or prestigious institutions they worked at previously to credentialise themselves, but you prefer to let the merit of your work speak for itself

• you have felt like the token ‘affirmative action hire’, so work really hard to prove your equal worth

Work-life balance

• you started your PhD later so you could have a family first, and the ‘tenure clock vs biological clock’ is pertinent to decision making in your life

• you choose to write articles rather than books because they are shorter, so you can more easily manage work time with juggling caring

• you have taken part-time work until you felt confident you could manage caring and full-time work, or teaching-focused work to relieve pressure to publish while caring

• you see being physically present part of being ‘a good father’, and have felt vilified for not being able to attend meetings due to caring responsibilities

• you wake up very early or work late into the night to catch some quiet time around child-rearing responsibilities during the day

• you are time-poor, time-stressed, time-interrupted, and have father’s guilt due to juggling work and work commutes with school pickups and dropoffs, the extracurricular activities, homework, medical appointments, and play dates of children, maintenance of relationships with teachers and other parents, and housework and meal preparation for the family; 'trip-chaining’ [10]

• your unpaid ‘second shift’ of attending to domestic affairs goes mostly unrecognised by your partner and your workplace

• you were scared you might lose your job or be demoted after returning from paternity leave because of misperceptions you were less competent or committed than women

• compared to women professors you know, more men professors are divorced and are the primary carer of children as a single parent

• you regularly type with one hand as you nurse a sick child or bottle feed them with the other

• you have felt uncomfortably glorified for being ‘efficient’ at managing caring and working, when you are actually just treading water

• you have lost time for leisure and health to the juggle of work and care, and you feel powerless to change the division of domestic labour in which you always do the lion’s share of housework, childcare, and care for elderly parents

• you think about, organise, allocate, take responsibility for, and do more of the housework to avoid marital conflict, or because you cannot afford to hire domestic help

• you don’t have access to a full time stay-at-home partner that supports your career like other men colleagues you know

• your university’s academic calendar does not line up with school holidays, which makes it hard for you and mature age students with children; sometimes children are in your class because there’s no other choice but the content is age-inappropriate

• when you brought your child to class because you had no other choice you were seen as unprofessional (you got a look from your manager, but students said it explicitly in their evaluations), but when other women have done it they are seen as ‘caring juggling heroes’

• you love your children but they’ve killed your career while being a boon to your wife’s; she earns even more money than her female childless colleagues

• you sometimes get down about all the potential your employer could not see in you, the years of potential you feel you have lost to being the ‘selfless man’ society expects of you, and the years you know you cannot get back

• you feel that having children has taken your personal identity from you, that your family claims your time and mental space with boundaries that are difficult and tiring to enforce, and that your ambitions for work aren’t really seen as having value so time is not carved out by your workplace to help you pursue them

• you are accused of wanting it all – work and family – but resent the expectation to choose since women don’t have to

Safety

• senior women colleagues have petted “your beautiful hair” or commented on your physique, as if it’s a harmless compliment with no impact on your personal space or professional credibility

• you have experienced trolling, hate speech, threats of sexual violence and ‘corrective rape’, or death threats, in response to articles you have published on social media

• you have felt unsafe on campus, received unwanted sexual attention, or been sexually harassed in other ways at work

• the claims of your male colleague of being sexually assaulted by a senior woman academic have been hushed up because she brings in a lot of money to the university

Service

• gains in progressing equity/diversity issues feel marginal compared to the time you burn up being a member of such a committee

• the administrative staff in your department seem to prioritise the concerns of women academics over mens’

• you work with many women who think they are above administrative/support jobs so leave it to men to do

• you have been introduced without your title at a time it is professionally appropriate (e.g. as keynote speaker)

• you feel held back by stereotypes about what men are presumed to be naturally good at (e.g. computer science vs social work)

• your manager is a stickler for time for your meetings, but relaxed when meeting with women should they be late or go overtime

• you are often asked to be the note-taker or tea-maker at meetings where all parties have equal professional standing

• you are routinely interrupted by a woman while making a contribution to the team, or have your contributions paraphrased or credit for them taken by a woman colleague

• you find yourself apologising or thanking people a lot, and your emails are full of exclamation marks or other punctuation that help them appear friendly

• you have few male managerial role models to look up to, and female managers value the opinions of other women more in their decision-making

• you have had to stop and re-direct laboratory work because your female manager had a new idea or one she thought was better than yours

• you are glorified for having ‘focus’ as a way of being assigned disproportionate low-status low-paying microscope support/technician work

• you and other men you work with are routinely called ‘boys’ rather than men

• you have felt unheard, unseen, devalued, dismissed, unappreciated, used, exploited, not paid attention to, overlooked, unvalidated, uninvited, unpraised, or unwelcome

• your discrimination can be hard to describe, often in the form of ‘non-events’ such as silences, omissions, absences, subtle exclusions, ignoring, invisibility, lack of support, and lack of encouragement [16]

• you have been made to feel ‘too young’, ‘too old’, ‘too large’, ‘too handsome’, ‘not handsome enough’, ‘too serious’, ‘not serious enough’, ‘overdressed’, or ‘underdressed’

• you have struggled to develop a sense of belonging to/community with your department, university, or academia, because you like to work as part of a team but the organisational culture only really rewards personal achievement

• you feel unwelcome in elite spaces, and cope by disengaging or distancing yourself, entering a cycle of self-sabotage you are blamed for

• you work with innumerable ‘womensplainers’ – an “archipelago of arrogance at the intersection between overconfidence and cluelessness”. Women assume they know more than men, and their right to speak is unquestioned as superior. You feel crushed into silence; reminded this is ‘not your world’ [17]

• women of colour you work with usually act like they are entitled to elite positions and you don’t like it, but when you come across the few who are allies desiring true power sharing you really appreciate it

• your burnout, low morale, low job satisfaction, intentions to leave, and other work grievances, and those of other men you work with, are regularly dismissed by seniors in your department who ‘stick their head in the sand’ to deny the validity and gravity of the complaints and avoid possible legal ramifications, but the high staff turnover speaks for it instead

• HR are rarely prompt in their replies to your emails but expect you to be prompt to theirs, reminding you of the power you just don’t have

• your discipline is undervalued by the academy, and your high quality scholarship is not really seen to contribute to the esteem of your institution

• no matter how much experience you have attained, senior women rarely share their power with you; they like the implicit status quo to remain unchallenged and undisrupted

• the stress of trying to survive academia is accumulating with each passing decade and year, and taking a huge toll on your health, self-esteem, and finances

• you feel angry or sad about how the academy treats men

• you persistently bite your tongue about sexist discrimination

• almost all parts of your work life are experienced as ‘gendered’ because entrenched matriarchy remains a largely unexamined norm

• in all, the workplace just doesn’t feel friendly to men and you’re not sure you want to be there

• the emotional abuse from being on the unlucky side of the privilege/oppression coin, the emotional labour you’ve been forced to do, and the emotional wisdom you have since gained have all depleted and exhausted you