Ash Ford-McAllister

  There are quite a few structural/systemic flaws in the UK government's proposed social care reforms , which I've already briefly discussed from my remit of The Productive Pessimist . One key element I wanted to draw out and discuss in more depth here on my  personal blog - as it ties in to one of the aspects of public speaking   I personally offer via The Productive Pessimist, outside of the main focus of that business - is the Recruitment  intention to "recruit more men..." Masculinity is one of my core public speaking topics, with a particular slant of masculinity in a female-focused world.  And "masculinity in a female-focused world" is exactly  what we're dealing with in this stated intention to "recruit more men" to the social care sector. Historically, the default assumption has been "men won't work in social care because it doesn't pay well",  and "men see care as 'women's work', so they consider it b...

  The millennium was a quarter of a century ago. The Covid-19 pandemic, its global lockdowns, and the paradigm shifts in the world of work, that too many managers and meddlers are still attempting to forcibly roll back, was half a decade ago. Twenty years ago, I stood on the edge of adulthood, calmly eager, focusedly excited. I knew what I wanted, I knew how to get it, and I had the energy, intelligence, and drive to pursue it. I didn't know then that even all of those things together would never be enough. Those past twenty years have been brutal - but there have been moments of beauty in the brutality, too. In those twenty years, I've had the prospect of the career I'd intended taken away, and, in the last three years, have seen many more possibilities fall by the wayside, because the issue that took that initial career became something worse, something more impactful, something that took away more and more as the months rolled by. Twenty years ago, I was going to take my...