Tim and I met in an English literature class our junior year of college, and we’ve been together the ten years since. While he ended up going into IT, I stayed in the arts track and ended up doing non-profit work after college when I realized I didn’t actually want to be a schoolteacher. Just to say that we always assumed he’d out-earn me by a considerable margin, though when he made more I always insisted we split things evenly to avoid potential resentment down the road.
I’ve had sort of a non-linear career path, but ended up switching to the corporate world. To make a long story short, my arts degree and time doing non-profit work gave me a lot of skills that enable me to really excel professionally in some more niche areas. I recently started a new job as a consultant, making way more than I’d ever anticipated. When I got the offer, I told Tim that the pay was “amazing”, but he didn’t ask about the actual amount and I didn’t want to be braggy about it, especially since I was fairly sure it was above his current income.
Well we just put in an application for a new place, and in the process of having to submit our payslips it’s become obvious that I make roughly 30% more than he does now. I expected him to think that was cool, since he’s a feminist and has always been super supportive of my career. But instead he’s started to make increasingly harsh jabs about how I “cheated the system” to get where I am, that no English lit major makes more than a cyber security professional without cheating somehow.
His major point is that I got my first job out of nepotism, which set me up to “trample” more qualified people who didn’t have the same advantages. It’s true that I got my first post-college job after being referred by a sorority sister, but it was for non-profit work making 22k/yr, not exactly at somebody’s daddy’s firm. He also points out that at my first corporate job, I snagged a big promotion after volunteering to take on starting up the company’s diversity/equity/inclusion program, and I’ll admit that were I a man, it’s highly unlikely I would have been able to be the face of the eventually high-profile diversity program. Tim also notes that I was awarded a small college scholarship for being a “promising female writer”, when no such scholarship existed for males.
But all that said…I still don’t feel like I cheated the system, and it makes me angry to listen to him “joke” about it, especially since I grew up blue-collar and worked fulltime while going to school fulltime to afford my degree. I reached a breaking point yesterday when he made a crack about how the new/first woman on his team is an obvious diversity hire. I told him that his jokes about women cheating the system to get ahead aren’t funny or “guy-talk ribbing” as he says, they make him sound like an insecure little boy. He told me I was being a naïve Karen and we haven’t really talked since