I strongly dispute that from personal experience, recording that such bigoted attitudes held me back in my career building 25 years ago when I went from volunteering as a crèche rota volunteer at a Quaker Meeting and uncle six times over to attempting to widen my career choices by becoming a child care worker.
At that time in the 1990's there was a huge emphasis on BBC Radio 2's Derek Jameson Show and the like about single men as possible paedophiles, and such prejudices can account for the fact that while one of only two men in a class with 18 women on a jobcentre-funded course toward 'Pre-school Playgroups Association' certification, I was the last person to receive a placement. Working in favour of the other man was the fact that he was a father; working against my candidature even for workplacement, as my training provider's Assistant Placements Officer told me, was the fact that potential placement providers had turned round after saying, "We're dead keen on having male students on placement because of our Equal Opportunities Policy."
Explaining their change of tune, they later told her, "We've decided that a male worker would require too much supervision." So I had to wait two months before — half way through the course — receiving a placement, which was just one or two mornings per week before the course ended. In that time, the Assistant Placements Officer reported to me that the placement manager had told her I was "an excellent male role model to small children."
The same placement manager believed that small children required far more male role models, not fewer. What kind of male role modelling for society do Iain Duncan Smith and John Redwood — who promoted 'traditional family values' candidate Leadsom as Tory candidate present to society?
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