Caroline Haslett means nothing to most people in Ireland, but she is largely responsible for our need to pack adaptors when travelling anywhere other than Britain or Malta. The features that distinguish our plugs – the earth pin, the shutter mechanism, fuses – contribute to them being widely regarded as the safest in the world. These features were included because Haslett, a member of the 20-person commission tasked with designing British plugs and sockets in the 1940s, recognised the dangers that domestic electricity posed to small children. Could it be pure coincidence that the only woman on the design team prioritised this?
Whenever I hear of the importance of more women in male-dominated fields, I think of Haslett. Her legacy has protected children for decades, thanks to the combination of her impressive electrical engineering skill set and her perspective as a woman. Gender balance is not, nor should it be, merely in service of equalising the headcounts of women vs men. But women have perspectives and experience that men do not, and neglecting them leaves us all worse off.
Ideally, this motivation would be less pressing. In a perfect world, men would be just as likely as women to (literally) think of the children. But the world we live in is shaped by generations of imbalance, with lingering effects: like it or not, if my husband and I are searching for a new car, the algorithm will show him content that focuses on acceleration, road feel and handling, while I will be shown boot space, Isofix features and childlocks.
Headline numbers show gender disparity is decreasing, but for some, this natural progress is not fast enough. This can lead to specific initiatives to increase gender balance in various domains, including quotas, targets and dedicated appointments. I fully support the spirit and intention of these initiatives. But as a woman and a mother of four in a male-dominated field, I see the problems that can arise when gender balance initiatives are designed and championed by men and women from other domains, or who are unfamiliar with the evidence base. If the primary goal is mere gender balance, blunt instruments are obviously effective – but their unintended consequences are often borne by women themselves.
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One immediate problem is that many such initiatives – gender balance quotas at board and management level, for example – apply in quite limited, high-income fields. Boosting female visibility too often means women taking on additional roles, such as panels, funding applications, outreach or media, creating a disproportionate burden on women. The same small, albeit high income, group is repeatedly called upon to undertake ancillary tasks.
It’s also true that blunt instruments such as gender balance quotas carry a subtle cost, contributing to an unfair, but real, perception that women are selected based on gender rather than merit. If a man performs badly, it reflects badly on him. If a woman performs badly, it reflects badly on women. Impostor syndrome is tiresome enough without facing the small but irksome worry that I owe various invitations at least in part to my gender – a thought my male colleagues will never have to entertain.
A far broader approach is required to address gender gaps beyond media panels and C-suites. However, these sometimes appear to be based more on vibes than evidence. This is also true of outreach programmes to encourage girls with an aptitude for maths and science to consider entering those fields – they are often well-meaning but simplistic initiatives that overlook the fact that a girl with a high mark in maths is more likely than her male classmates to also have high marks in English. In other words, they may simply have more options available to them than their male counterparts. Telling well-rounded girls with the ability to excel in many fields that they are likely to choose the wrong field is patronising at best.
Any gender gap among students entering scientific fields is relatively low, but a 2025 study by researchers at the University of Bath and University College Dublin found women are more likely than men to exit science, technology, engineering and maths fields, with the gender gap rising to 20 percentage points by 15 years post-graduation. Concentrating on attracting girls into male-dominated fields without interrogating why women are less likely to stay there is counterproductive.
We all know of people – often women – who have repeatedly sought a part-time or flexible work schedule, only to be refused by management. It would be ironic if it wasn’t so frustrating. Too many of the same employers who eagerly host shiny corporate events for International Women’s Day baulk at facilitating remote and flexible working, part-time and compressed working weeks. And they fail to encourage a high uptake of all parental leave for mothers and fathers alike.
A 2017 study found that in households where the spouses both take parental leave and the mother returns to full-time employment afterwards, “the increase in the gender management gap is much smaller, and it is no longer significant towards the end of the period”. But gender quotas for board membership seem to have few, if any, such spillover effects. Why then is the (admittedly comparatively easier) task of adding women to a board prioritised over reshaping workplace norms to be explicitly flexible and family-friendly?
One final, deeply frustrating consequence of these initiatives is that it invariably seems to fall to women to highlight and troubleshoot problems as they arise. So often, when discussing gender balance with male colleagues, they voice wholehearted agreement – but then note that I can say these things as a woman, whereas the men in these fields (supposedly) cannot. Something is badly wrong when the burden for pointing out problems with policies designed to address female disadvantage becomes yet another thing on women’s to-do list.
[ What’s really holding women back at work?Opens in new window ]
Initiatives that directly target outcomes only, such as quotas or ring-fenced appointments, will move the needle on visible metrics. From the outside, they have succeeded. But as long as the underlying dynamics that hold women back in the first place are not addressed, women in male-dominated fields pay a steep price for this “progress” – they pay for it in terms of increased workload, more pressure and a persistent perception that our achievements reflect something other than merit.
Muireann Lynch is an energy economist at the Economic and Social Research Institute
