O:JA&L Prose Discourse: Nonfiction
Contemporary Controversies
Personal Essay
Mick McGrath
IF I HAVE TO READ ONE MORE THING
ABOUT EMBITTERED WOMEN
CLAWING THEIR WAY TO THE TOP
IN A MALE-DOMINATED SOCIETY…
A Strongly Worded Response to Alice Hatcher’s Recent Essay
etween 2021 and 2024, I taught at a for-profit college in the South. I’d been teaching English Composition my entire career, but at South College, I’d been hired to teach a student success course called College Management.
About eighty percent of South College students were female. And yes, when I informally polled one of my classes one day, most students told me they struggled with anxiety—almost every hand went up. So, in addition to teaching study techniques and test-taking tips, I taught my College Management students “self-care.” I introduced them to ideas like Box Breathing and gratitude journals, ways of mitigating anxiety. My female supervisor had forbidden me from recommending rigorous exercise, but I could at least encourage my students to go on long walks, and indeed I did—I told students that superintellects like Darwin, Beethoven, and Einstein were all habitual walkers (and yes, I worried that referencing three white guys would get me in hot water).
I asked students to work on their Fixed Mindsets, pointing to the work of Carroll Dweck and Stanford neuroscientist Andrew Huberman, among others. “Health & Wealth,” I told students. (Of course, when people say, “Health & Wealth,” they usually mean that wealthy people tend to be healthier, but when I said it, I simply meant that taking care of yourself physically and mentally will be conducive to your success.)
lice Hatcher’s recent essay jumped out at me. The essay amounts to a gigantic eyeroll at the annual University of Arizona Crossroads Conference, which in 2024 focused largely on self-care, and as I’ve said, I know a thing or two about self-care, having taught it (among other things) for nearly three years.
However, Ms. Hatcher and I seem to disagree about the merits of self-care. I, for one, happen to think some of the ideas nested under self-care can advantage students—and employees, while I’m at it. At South College, I introduced my students to things like test-preparation rituals. “Right before your exam,” I told students, “take ten minutes to make a list of your worries. What gives you agita? Write it down.”
If test-preparation rituals sound unscientific, you might be interested to know that a study published in Science, the most prestigious scientific journal in the world, teaches us that students can improve their test scores simply by writing about their worries in the minutes preceding an exam. My supervisor at South College had forbidden me from mentioning the despicable Jordan Peterson in front of students, because most of my students were female and Peterson had once fat-shamed a plus-sized model, but on his Self-Authoring website, Peterson does point to research corroborating the impact of writing on one’s mental health and scholastic achievement.
s. Hatcher acknowledges that the ideas she encountered at the 2024 Crossroads Conference were aimed at women—just as I acknowledge that a lot of the self-care exercises I taught at South College were aimed at my female students, who were more likely than my male students to report anxiety, catastrophic thinking, etc. (My female students’ anxiety was so bad my supervisor once told me not to use the word fail in front of them.)
Ms. Hatcher is insulted by some of these ideas. In one anecdote, deep into her essay, she describes a conference speaker who tells female attendees to turn their ANTs (Automatic Negative Thoughts) into PETs (Positive Empowering Thoughts). She finds some of the ideas she encountered at the Crossroads Conference “infantilizing.” The real way to help overworked, chronically stressed, female employees, Ms. Hatcher implies, is to give them raises, not to suggest breathing exercises.
Except the real way to get a raise, I couldn’t help but think while reading Ms. Hatcher’s essay, is to sell your services on the open market, no? You don’t just ask for a raise from your current employer; first, you find another job, and then you politely tell your employer you’re going “across the street” if he or she doesn’t start paying you more. If, on the other hand, you insist on staying where you are (because, for example, you love your coworkers, because you love your supervisor, because you love the town you live in and the life you’ve built for yourself), you can work hard to get a promotion at your current place of employment, which in turn will come with a substantive raise.
Except promotions often lead to more stress, not less.
don’t doubt the seriousness of the workplace conditions Ms. Hatcher describes in her essay—though I do wonder if she’s getting carried away when she uses words like abuse and oppression to describe the University of Arizona’s treatment of its employees, and while I’m at it, I do wonder why these women don’t simply quit their jobs and go elsewhere, especially since companies these days are screaming for women and people of color, anything but white men. I don’t doubt that women at the University of Arizona were stretched to their emotional limits due to short staffing, as Ms. Hatcher tells us. But aren’t people in positions of power always confronted by crises that cause them extraordinary levels of stress? Like, isn’t that par for the course?
If these women had reached maximum stress levels working at an in-extremis University of Arizona, how could they expect to succeed in positions of power? Perhaps, to some extent, this explains the income gap between men and women. If women are more likely to experience anxiety, maybe they’ll be less likely to thrive in lucrative leadership positions.
t South College, I watched as women were promoted to leadership positions within weeks of their start dates. One woman was promoted to General Education Department Chair for the Atlanta campus. Another woman was promoted to General Education Department Chair for the Knoxville campus. Yet another woman was promoted to “College Management Course Lead.” All three women vacated these positions after two or three months.
Another woman was promoted to Director of Advising. I was friendly with this particular woman and would talk with her on Teams regularly, but after her promotion, she became aloof. When I asked her what was up, she told me she was overwhelmed by her new promotion and she couldn’t talk to me anymore. She went on to tell me she didn’t intend to stay in the Director of Advising position long term.
How would the women Ms. Hatcher mentions in her essay handle lawsuits, for example? What about EEOC investigations? What will they do when they fire someone who later sues their company for Civil Rights violations? How will they handle reading their names in the press in the context of a multi-million-dollar lawsuit?
No, I am not saying women can’t thrive in leadership positions. Women, it occurs to me, thrive in leadership roles all the time. I am simply suggesting they may be less likely to.
To be fair, at no point does Ms. Hatcher even say she wants to be in a position of power—in her essay, she is merely bemoaning a besieged University of Arizona telling its employees to be more positive as they complain (understandably, I’m sure) about “Sisyphean” working conditions. But surely Ms. Hatcher has read the news in recent years and has seen women all over the country demanding higher pay. And come to think of it, she does mention male power at one point in her essay.
How does Ms. Hatcher reconcile the following truths: 1.) Women want higher pay, which is often the result of advancement to positions of power, and 2.) Women are more likely to report anxiety, meaning many women will be psychologically ill-suited for positions of power?
guess I was just kind of irked by Ms. Hatcher’s essay. Maybe it has something to do with Kairos, i.e. Ms. Hatcher’s timing.
This essay, about women working tirelessly at the University of Arizona only to be given “sops,” comes at a time of widespread mistreatment of men, not women. According to a 2023 article published by the American Enterprise Institute, nearly half of young men now feel they face discrimination. (At least the women at the University of Arizona have jobs, Ms. Hatcher.)
The lawsuits are piling up. In 2024, an organization called Faculty, Alumni & Students Opposed to Racial Preferences (FASORP) filed a lawsuit accusing Northwestern University of discriminating against white men. Similar accusations are now being made at George Mason University, the University of Washington, the University of California, the University of Michigan, Cambridge, Cornell, Duke… Toward the end of her essay, Ms. Hatcher says President Trump is ruining academia, but of course, many argue academia lost its way a long time ago, practicing reverse discrimination and refusing to hire anyone they disagree with, never mind that academia is supposed to be a place of truth-seeking, which requires looking at multiple perspectives.
Accusations of reverse discrimination are happening outside of academia, too—at companies like Starbucks and Google. This phenomenon has even inspired a podcast called White Men Can’t Work. Jeremy Carl has written a book about it.
Incidentally, when you make it harder for men to get jobs, you make it harder for them to find someone to share their lives with, since it is men, not women, who need money to compete in the sexual marketplace. I’m not saying anything revelatory here. There has always been enormous societal pressure on men (not so much women) to make money. In short, men need work—need it the way they need water, just about. Meanwhile, a lot of women just want to look cute in a pencil skirt.
onsider the following data packet: Men are more likely than women to commit suicide, to be the victims of violent crime, to be incarcerated, to die in a war, to die at work (because they tend to do more dangerous work, like climbing a tree with a chainsaw, which might also explain the income gap), to abuse drugs, to abuse alcohol, to be homeless, to lose their kids in a divorce, etc. Today, men are less likely to be college-educated. Yet it seems every time men turn on the television or open their internet browser, they get to hear how difficult things are for women.
And I suppose that’s what irked me about Ms. Hatcher’s essay. All my life, I’ve heard that men are awful and women are hard-done-by.
It’s getting old.
About the writer:
Mick McGrath is the author of two books—a novel called The Deplorable (2023) and a collection of short stories called People with Whom I Am Quite Pissed (2025).
Image: Legion Departs (AI-assisted digital image) by O:JA&L staff creative. 2025. Public domain via MidJourney AI.
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