A man has sparked a debate by bizarrely claiming his girlfriend must have 'cheated the system' to earn more money than him - and now she's been urged to dump him.
The woman, who has remained anonymous, met her partner, Tim, when they were in school and the pair shared an English literature class.
Now they've been together for ten years and have spent most of their lives together, and saw each other start their career.
Tim went into cybersecurity and the woman stayed in the arts world, so the expectation was that he would be the main wage earner - but then suddenly she landed a new job.
After training for ten years she was offered a position as a consultant, which came with a whopping salary, and when Tim found out their problems began.
Sharing her situation on Reddit, the woman posted: "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 liberal 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."
The woman then continued to say that during her time work for non-profits, she gained a lot of skills and experience that made her highly desirable to employers.
She continued: "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 paystubs it’s become obvious that I make roughly 30 per cent 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 cybersecurity professional without cheating somehow."
The woman then reveals Tim's two gripes - that she got her first job out of nepotism, and that she benefitted from being a woman as she headed a diversity campaign.
She continued: "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.
"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 white 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 full-time 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 yesterday."
The internet rallied around the woman and seemed to unanimously agree she wasn't in the wrong.
One user posted: "Dump him. He's sexist and toxic toward women. Imagine you have kids with him someday. Using people you know to find jobs is 100 per cent normal and called networking."
And another said: "The fact that his team have only recently hired the first female - the first woman! - despite women being 50 per cent of the population.
"And he can’t see the fact that he has his job because he is a man. That he was hired because of his male privilege!
"To the extent that all the members of his team are male, and he thinks that is due to merit, just highlights that this guy is not a feminist."
