WHEN Australian Kim O'Grady wrote a blog post called "How I Discovered Gender Discrimination", few could predict the media storm it would create.

The Perth management consultant's Tumblr post detailed his struggles to find work in the 1990s when he had plenty of experience in sales and engineering but still struggled to impress potential employers.

After four months of knock backs and very few calls despite his experience he took a closer look at his CV and was horrified when he realised why potential employers may have disregarded him.

"I was particularly pleased with the decision I made to brand it with my name with just enough bold positioning to make it instantly recognisable, and as I sat scouring every detail of that CV a horrible truth slowly dawned on me. My name," he wrote on Tumblr.

"My first name is Kim. Technically its gender neutral but my experience showed that most people's default setting in the absence of any other clues is to assume Kim is a women's name. And nothing else on my CV identified me as male. At first I thought I was being a little paranoid but engineering, trades, sales and management were all definitely male dominated industries. So I pictured all the managers I had over the years and, forming an amalgam of them in my mind, I read through the document as I imagined they would have. It was like being hit on the head with a big sheet of unbreakable glass ceiling."

Adding the honorific Mr to the CV soon changed everything.

"I made one change that day. I put Mr in front of my name on my CV. It looked a little too formal for my liking but I got an interview for the very next job I applied for. And the one after that. It all happened in a fortnight and the second job was a substantial increase in responsibility over anything I had done before," Mr O'Grady said.

The experience gave him an invaluable insight into the struggles many women face trying to climb the corporate ladder.

Wendy Tuohy blog: Discrimination validated and documented by a generous man.

The original post- which has over 2,000 comments- has been republished by Atlantic Media, Quartz, and AOL plus it has featured in news stories on The Daily Mail, The Huffington Post, ABC News in the US.

Mr O'Grady wrote a follow up post commenting on how far and wide the story had spread and how often men knowingly benefit invasive sexism.

"People have expressed sadness, disappointment, anger, but no man or woman has expressed disbelief. I have also not seen a single example of anyone declaring that my story is only relevant to my local experience as an Australian. It's been shared widely throughout the USA, Canada and the UK, and I have even seen a few links from outside the anglosphere. Yet everywhere it is greeted with knowing assent,' he said.

"The sad reality is this shows we all know how real and invasive sexism is. We all know that sexism unnecessarily impacts negatively on women's lives and men benefit from that."

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