Men, we have a problem
A Personal Development note for men in positions of influence
Two public stories have been sitting in my mind lately. They moved me not because they are unusual, but because they are all too familiar.
In one, attention returns to powerful men and the system around them. The public conversation, as it often does, slips into spectacle and faction biting faction. Survivors become objects of scrutiny. Institutions circle the wagons to manage reputational risk. The search for clarity becomes a kind of political football. The harm becomes background noise.
In the other, a shocking case in France involving Gisèle Pelicot, what begins to ripple outward, anchored by one courageous line that landed beyond the courtroom, the message that “shame has to change sides”. She refused the usual arrangement in which victims carry the social cost while perpetrators are cushioned by denial, distraction, and the quiet preference of institutions for “moving on.”
I’m writing this as a husband, a father of two adult daughters, a grandparent to a three-year-old tornado, and a management educator. I’m writing as an ordinary man, to other ordinary men, because the easiest way to think about misogyny would normally be to place it “over there”, in villains and outliers and headline cases. But the World Health Organisation estimates that about 1 in 3 women globally experience physical and/or sexual violence in their lifetime, so this is enormous.
And so, the harder leadership question is how to set the conditions for a decent business in a decent organisation full of decent people. As long as certain issues are not addressed, we can never get there. If we brush misogyny aside, laugh it off, tolerate it, or fail to call it out, we are not neutral. We are participating.
Why frame this as Personal Development?
My definition of Personal Development is simple and demanding: the identification and removal of those restraints that limit the likelihood of sustainable individual, organisational, social and environmental health and well-being.
I use that definition here to prevent this from becoming an abstract moral stance. If misogyny is a restraint on personal development, then the question becomes practical: what does it restrain, how does it restrain it, and what would it mean, in real life, to remove it rather than merely condemn it?
This is not only about “bad men.” It is about the small patterns, repeated choices that shape a system. Whose account is believed, whose discomfort is treated as inconvenient, whose reputation is protected, whose pain is questioned, whose truth is re-labelled as “drama”?
The organisational reality we keep avoiding
In senior management and governance, prejudice rarely arrives with a fanfare. It arrives more often masquerading as professionalism.
The UK has made visible progress in board-level representation, but corporate leadership still lags. A recent FTSE article (based on 2024 data and reported in the 2025 FTSE Women Leaders Review) found that:
Women hold 43.4% of board roles across the FTSE 350.
Women hold 35.3% of leadership roles (executive committee and their direct reports), and the number of women CEOs in the FTSE 350 is 19 (and has fallen in recent years).
In the UK’s 50 largest private companies, women hold 31% of board seats, noticeably behind listed firms.
Those numbers are the organisational expression of a system of senior leadership that is more balanced toward males. The default reference point for how a leader looks, sounds, and behaves tends to stay male, too. Higher Education institutions are getting better, but Management Education, in particular, has to be wary of assumptions that may still be baked in the workplace. If women feel they have to compensate for this by working 10 times harder, and men carry on without changing anything, it doesn’t feel healthy or sustainable.
The social mechanism I keep noticing
There is a form of misogyny that is obvious: contempt, coercion, cruelty. It sells well online. It makes men money and recruits followers through grievance, not merit. The more organisationally dangerous form is quieter and lives in the routines and norms which are still found in 2026. It sounds like:
“He’s a good guy.”
“Let’s not make this into a thing.”
“She’s difficult.”
“Think about the reputational risk.”
These sentences might not always be malicious, but there is rarely a follow-up to confirm whether they are. I have witnessed negative examples over the years, and it is almost never called out. That is why they work. While they help the room/team/department (actually, often the senior manager) stay comfortable and perhaps protect the surface, they make it easier to doubt than to inquire. They are a symptom of a deeper resistance to change. Moreover, they are the code that the system uses to reproduce itself.
A careful word about “freeing ourselves”
How do we move ahead? How can we educate ourselves in this?
There is a temptation to say that men need to “emancipate” themselves from misogyny. I do not love that word here, because it risks false equivalence, as if men are harmed in the same way women are harmed. They are not.
I think the answer must come from a process of finding common ground with other human beings (not always easy) and building trust from there. I would say there are four universals we all share. And these are questions can be answered, collectively and individually, in different ways. They deal with (a) how productive we are, (b) what our morality and ethics are, (c) how we belong, and (d) the extent of our awareness of the self. Most of the time, this is not conflictual. When it does become a problem, it really becomes a problem. This tension in society now is a mix of contradictory principles held about being moral (defining equality, honesty, and justice) and belonging (prizing harmony, loyalty, status, and tradition). Many men live inside a narrow repertoire of belonging: status, control, silence, performance, complicity. The rewards are real, which is why they’re protected, and so are the costs.
If you are a man, you may fear losing your masculinity in exploring the vulnerability of your beliefs and principles, but exactly the opposite is true. Many of us learn to treat empathy as weakness, uncertainty as danger, accountability as humiliation, and consent as negotiable only on our terms. We learn that the first job is to protect the tribe and preserve the surface.
All that is our conditioning.
If we want to free ourselves in any meaningful sense, we have to be willing to let go of certain comforts that are getting in the way, such as being believed without effort, being given the benefit of the doubt, or not having to notice what our presence makes harder for other people. Go and rewatch Emily Maitlis’s now iconic 2019 interview with Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor to see someone trapped in just such a web of self-deception.
Why this belongs in management education
Post-experience management education sits in a strange place. It is not only about capability. It is about the formation of people who shape systems.
Many of my students already have influence. They lead. They allocate resources, set standards, and decide what gets rewarded and what gets punished. They shape what can be said without cost, and what cannot. They determine whether truth-telling is protected, penalised, or politely ignored.
This is why ‘sustainable health and well-being’ is not a soft add-on. It is the point of return whenever you need to ground your judgment in what you are doing. A leader’s private development becomes public consequence the moment they have power, including the power to make reporting abuse or prejudice safer or riskier, and the power to decide whether organisational harmony will be bought at someone else’s expense.
If we teach management as mechanics only, we train competence. If we teach it as the practice of human systems with consequences, we must include the ethics of how harm becomes more or less likely, and how accountability becomes more or less possible.
The reflective turn, aimed at myself first
Here are the types of questions I am now beginning to sit with. They are meant to be diagnostic.
When a woman’s account is presented, do I reach for doubt/judgment before inquiry?
Do I silently reward the men who keep things submerged, and quietly penalise those who name what is awkward?
Do I treat safety as the absence of visible conflict, rather than the presence of healthy conditions?
When I say “it’s complicated”, whose interests am I defending?
In my organisation, who is routinely interrupted, second-guessed, or asked to prove their merit beyond their results?
If shame is to change sides, then men have to stop outsourcing the cost of any discomfort to women. We have to stop treating the underlying truth as a disruption and start treating it as a precondition for building sustainable health and well-being.
That includes self-accountability, of course, and zero tolerance on our part for any abuse, violence, or exploitation. As men, we have to practice credible listening and ask ourselves who we are being, such that this is an issue among our fellow men.
I don’t have answers, and at the same time, I don’t want to assist anyone to perpetrate this and inflict a world of discrimination and exploitation on those I care most for. I’d welcome comments, thoughts, and conversation on this.
