The Best Gender Equity Work of the Last Decade Has Been Done with Men. Why Don’t We Talk About It?

There is a persistent and damaging myth in the gender equity space: that working with men on gender inclusion is a distraction from, or a dilution of, the work of advancing women. The myth is understandable. It emerged partly from legitimate fatigue with “men’s feelings” being centred in conversations that should be centred on women’s experience, and partly from the observation, well-founded, that many male engagement programmes produce a great deal of discussion and very little change in male behaviour. But the myth is wrong, and acting on it is one of the most reliable ways to limit the impact of gender equity work to the margins of organisational culture rather than producing the systemic change that the evidence shows is possible.

The research on gender equity programme effectiveness is not ambiguous on this point. McKinsey’s Women in the Workplace research consistently identifies male manager behaviour as the single most powerful determinant of women’s career advancement in corporate settings. Catalyst’s research on male allyship documents the specific manager behaviours that are most associated with women’s retention, promotion, and reported sense of inclusion. The White Men as Full Diversity Partners framework, developed by Bill Proudman and Michael Welp, has produced documented outcome data from corporate programmes across multiple industries. The common thread in all of this is direct: the barrier to women’s advancement is not primarily women’s capability deficit. It is the behaviour of the men, predominantly, who control the systems through which advancement is allocated. Working on the behaviour of those men is not a distraction. It is the intervention.

The research base on male engagement in gender equity is larger and more consistent than most organisations’ programme designs reflect. Jeanine Prime and Corinne Moss-Racusin’s research for Catalyst, published in their “Engaging Men in Gender Initiatives” series, identifies a specific cluster of male manager behaviours, which they term MENTOR PLUS, that are strongly associated with women’s advancement: publicly advocating for women’s work in senior settings, actively creating stretch opportunities for women rather than waiting for women to request them, intervening visibly when gender-based exclusion micro-behaviours occur, and sharing domestic and parental responsibility in ways that normalise these choices for male team members who observe them. These are specific, observable, and teachable behaviours. They are also behaviours that require more than awareness to produce. They require the manager to have worked through the personal and cultural frameworks that make performing them feel either natural or uncomfortable.

The MALE CHAMPION EFFECT is one of the most robust findings in the gender equity literature. When a senior male leader publicly and consistently champions gender equity, the effect on other male leaders in the organisation is significantly greater than any programme designed to build awareness or attitudes. This is the social proof mechanism operating in the direction of inclusion rather than exclusion. When the most senior man in the room is visibly an advocate for women’s advancement, the social cost of male bystander behaviour increases. Other men who were silent or passive observers of exclusion micro-behaviours begin to intervene, not because their attitudes changed but because the social norm in the presence of a visible champion has shifted. The champion is not just advocating. They are changing the social calculation for every other man in their environment.

The research also documents the conditions under which male engagement programmes produce change versus those under which they produce the “sensitivity training” backlash that many male audiences associate with gender equity programmes. The conditions that produce change are: voluntary participation, a framing that invites men in rather than calling them out, a focus on specific behaviours rather than general attitudes, and the creation of community among male advocates rather than isolated individual development. The conditions that produce backlash are: mandatory participation, a framing that positions men primarily as the problem, a focus on awareness of bias without the skill-building required to change behaviour, and the absence of social support for the change that the programme is trying to produce. These conditions are, in many cases, entirely within the control of the programme designer.

The case for male engagement in gender equity work is not primarily about fairness to men, though that is also a consideration. It is about LEVERAGE. In most Indian corporate organisations, the majority of decision-making authority over hiring, promotion, sponsorship, assignment, and visibility allocation sits with men. This is not a moral statement. It is a demographic one, reflecting the current composition of senior leadership in most large Indian corporates. The implication is direct: the people with the most power to change the systems that produce gender inequity are, overwhelmingly, men. A gender equity programme that works primarily with women, developing their confidence, resilience, and advocacy skills, is building capability in the people with the least structural power to change the systems that the programme is trying to address. It is the organisational equivalent of developing the skills of marathon runners while leaving the course design unchanged.

This is not an argument against women’s leadership programmes. Women’s leadership development is valuable, and ProventusHR runs Women emPower specifically because the capability-building, community-building, and confidence-development that women’s leadership programmes provide are genuinely important. The argument is against women’s leadership programmes as the primary or sole gender equity intervention, deployed in organisations where the structural and behavioural barriers to women’s advancement remain unaddressed in the leadership population that has the authority to change them. Both the supply-side and the demand-side interventions are necessary. The field has been investing heavily in supply-side and modestly in demand-side, and the equity outcomes reflect this imbalance.

The India-specific case for male engagement is particularly compelling. India’s corporate leadership landscape is one of the most masculine in the world by structural measure: the proportion of women in senior leadership roles is among the lowest of any major economy, and the social and cultural norms around work, care, and career trajectories are among the most differentiated by gender. In this context, the argument that gender equity is primarily a women’s issue to be addressed through women’s programmes is not just strategically limited. It is practically disconnected from where the change needs to happen. The change needs to happen in the behaviour of the men who run these organisations. Working with those men, on the specific behaviours that produce or undermine gender equity, is the most direct available route to the outcome that all gender equity investment is trying to produce.

The first design principle for effective male engagement is INVITATION RATHER THAN ACCUSATION. Men who enter a gender equity programme feeling that they are there to be educated about their own bias are in a defensive starting state that the programme must spend significant time and energy unwinding before any developmental work can begin. Men who enter a programme that is framed as an opportunity to understand something important about the organisational dynamics they are part of, and to develop specific capabilities for addressing those dynamics, are in a constructively curious starting state that the programme can build from immediately. The framing is not cosmetic. It is the difference between a programme that activates the defensive response and one that activates the developmental response.

The second principle is PERSONAL RELEVANCE established early. The most effective opening for a male gender equity programme is not a presentation of the business case for gender diversity, which most male senior leaders have heard many times and have learned to agree with abstractly without connecting to their own behaviour. The most effective opening is a structured reflection exercise in which participants are asked to recall a moment in their own career when they were underestimated, excluded, or overlooked based on a characteristic rather than a capability. This is not a trick. It is a genuine developmental move. Most men have the experience, often early in their careers, of being judged by something other than their merit. Beginning with this experience creates a personal and embodied connection to the belonging construct that the business case presentation cannot, and it creates the bridge between personal experience and professional behaviour that the rest of the programme will develop.

The third principle is COMMUNITY AMONG ADVOCATES. Male gender equity work that produces isolated individual development without a community to sustain it predictably fails to sustain behaviour change beyond the immediate post-programme period. Men who are trying to perform allyship behaviours in environments where those behaviours are not socially normalised need a peer community that provides social support and normalises the new behaviour. This is the same social proof mechanism that the previous section described operating in the direction of inclusion: when a group of senior men share the experience of trying to change specific management behaviours, and when they meet regularly to share what is working and what is not, the social norm shifts within the group, and then from the group outward into the organisation. The community is not a nice-to-have. It is the sustainability mechanism.

Indian corporate cultures present specific challenges and specific opportunities for male engagement in gender equity work. The challenge is the CULTURAL SCRIPT around masculinity and work that is particularly pronounced in India’s professional formation contexts. The narrative of the breadwinner, the primary earner, the professionally indispensable leader who is always available and always performing, is deeply embedded in many Indian male professional identities in ways that create resistance to the sharing of domestic responsibility, the modelling of parental leave, and the visible prioritisation of non-work commitments that are among the most powerful belonging signals available to senior male leaders. Working with these cultural scripts, rather than against them, requires facilitation that is both culturally informed and developmentally skilled.

The opportunity in Indian corporate cultures is the MENTORSHIP TRADITION that is genuinely strong in many organisations. Indian senior male leaders are, in a significant proportion of cases, already invested in the development of junior colleagues, and they take their mentorship role seriously. The gender equity conversation can be entered productively through this existing investment: how is your mentorship distributed? Who are the junior colleagues you are most actively sponsoring and advocating for? Is the distribution of your sponsorship equitable across the team, or is it concentrated in the people who are most like you? These are not accusatory questions. They are reflective ones, and they invite the kind of honest self-examination that the mentorship tradition makes culturally available in Indian corporate contexts in a way that direct confrontation about bias does not.

RK

Founder & Principal Consultant, ProventusHR

RK holds the Master Certified Coach (MCC) credential from the ICF and is a Certified Practitioner of the Marshall Goldsmith Stakeholder Centred Coaching methodology. He has facilitated over 400 leadership, culture, and coaching programmes across India’s most complex organisations.