Our thanks to Jeff for this. Dannii Mathers inadvertently touches on a long-understood phenomenon with this line:
“Maybe the problem isn’t finding female talent, it’s keeping it!!”
In her 2008 book The Sexual Paradox, the American psychologist Susan Pinker – sister of the better-known Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker – outlined how her research showed that the “under-representation” of women at senior levels in corporations (in particular) was attributable to women declining advancement to more senior roles because they wanted better work/life balance. Jordan Peterson was hired by a Toronto law firm wishing to end (or at least reduce) the departures of high-flying female lawyers after they entered their 30s. He admitted he’d failed with all of them.
Yet the attempts to push water uphill never end. Of course outside the private sector women have been far more “successful” in attaining senior positions, but that has little (if anything) to do with merit.
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Justice for Men & Boys 
The Swedish Gov commissioned research projects int why, in such a feminist heaven as theirs, the was such a dearth of female senior management even in their female dominated public sector. The results of the various projects found: Women make rational choices of career, “crowding” into a narrow range of public sector occupations because these are well paid, offer shorter full time hours and easy opportunities for “flexible working” maternity or carers leave. They also choose to partner with well renumerated men further extending the possibility of “work life balance” without sacrificing living standards. With the result that even highly qualified females find it unnecessary to seek higher management roles which they see necessarily involve great commitment and availability, – in short, long hours.
Intriguingly the main policy responses to these findings were to introduce “compulsory” paternity leave and exhort men to be less committed and ambitious. Accepting that women would not easily be persuaded to give up their “work life balance” so the productivity of males had to be reduced to achieve “equality”. Fortunately for Sweden’s economic success their men appear to have been difficult to persuade. And Sweden actually languishes low in the charts of female senior managers and high in “gender segregated workforces” (and indeed in the “gender pay gap”)
As is often observed now (partly thanks to Jordan Peterson) the richest nations tend to have the greatest “gaps” precisely because in them women have such choice.
One of the other findings of the Swedish researches at the time was that it was in fact “two nations”. One typically in “professional” occupations (man in private sector woman in public services) with entirely a different other of technical or practical occupations (where both man and woman partners are typically self employed or employed in the private sector). The latter of course without any of the choices to avoid shifts, long hours, overtime or find sinecures and work/life balance.
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