Count Me Out

“Count Me Out” exposes business school professors’ salaries as a locus of intersectional discrimination rather than a neutral metric of value. The poem illuminates how women – particularly those racialised or coming from “colonised countries” bear both the material and symbolic burdens of undervaluation, even when they outperform. It also denounces what appears as socially acceptable compensation exposing it instead as an institutional mechanism that legitimises exclusion, competition and moral injury within neoliberal academic hierarchies where monetary rewards and publication metrics prevail. Moreover, it questions gendered leadership models, although often framed as “caring” may inadvertently reproduce these structural inequities rather than redress them.