The impact of ‘male-flight’ on equality

There has been a tendency in the DEI space to dumb down the complexities of inequality in an attempt for organisations to protect the reputation of their culture brand by providing largely irrelevant (or fudged) numbers to demonstrate progress. Or alternatively by DEI consultants in order to demonstrate ROI through dubious statistics that beef up their case studies.

Am I sounding cynical? Well, on this subject I am. Actually, frustrated and furious would probably be a more appropriate description.

Equality and diversity at work exist within a range of systems which have been… well, neither equal nor diverse. Results have been described in numbers based on the wrong activities in the wrong places. It is like baking a cake but instead of the oven putting the washing machine on instead… Then trying to prove your baking prowess with freshly laundered clothes. We have made little progress on the pay gap because there are deep-seated attitudes which will take a long time to shift, as. well as social gender-based phenomena which continue to compound inequality today - because they are evolving all the time. And this challenge is going to take more than a bit extra in the womens’ pay packets.

“In some professions, men lose interest when the representation of women goes above 60%…”

Take the impact of ‘gender-flight’ or more specifically ‘male-flight’. This is an observed phenomena which has found that in some professions men lose interest when the representation of women goes above 60%. In addition, when male-flight occurs in a profession the salaries tend to stagnate. The reasons for this are complex but the biggest contributing pressure is societal pressure regarding gender norms - which in addition to the ‘glass ceiling’ and the motherhood penalty, is a contributor to why so many women are also held back by the so-called ‘sticky floor’.