# Female managers refusing to meet male mentees

- **Episode:** [175](https://agents.truthliesandwork.com/episodes/175.md) (2025-02-27)
- **Type:** interview
- **Tags:** mentorship, gender, management
- **Time:** 49:08–52:32 (start 2948s)
- **Listen:** [https://truthliesandwork.com/175?t=2948](https://truthliesandwork.com/175?t=2948)

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[49:08] Al Elliott: This last one I've got here is, and it's an interesting one, a female manager won't meet male mentees. And I'm, and just to understand, I think mentees is a mentorship situation where it's The person, so this female manager will be the mentor and this male will be a mentee. Have I understood that right? Yep. So female manager won't meet the males she's mentoring outside the office, but will happily meet female mentees outside the office. Is this discriminatory towards the men?
[49:37] Enya Doyle: Probably. Um, I think particularly in, uh, in a space where you're supposed to be treating everyone Equitably, an interesting use of equitably versus equally. In a mentorship program where there's an assumption that the woman is in charge, if you're supposed to say you have 3, say you have 6 kind of mentees and 3 of them are women and 3 of them are men for this purpose, there are no non-binary people being engaged in this mentorship program, although we'll come back to that. When we're thinking about the next mentorship program cycle. But thinking about the way that you engage with those sexes in this program, what is it that you're doing? Are you taking the women out for coffee and having very casual conversations about their feelings and having very dry, stuffy business-type meetings with the men in-house? How does it change what they get access to, what part of you they're accessing? And particularly if they're in the same mentorship program. There are lots of good examples of mentorship programs and sponsorship programs that are specifically for women. And so, there might be completely different outcomes, and that is very legal and in the UK is definitely recommended, even in lots of industries. But if you've got people of both genders and you're explicitly treating them differently, And it's very clear that that's down gendered lines or down the lines of sex, you probably won't have an awful leg to stand on, even though what we can see and what we can tell is that there's that power imbalance, that women don't often want to take men for drinks or dinner because of that kind of risk of sexual assault. That is very real and that is there. But also in this scenario, then the solution to that is to think about the parameters around the mentorship program and keeping you safe. It's not about treating men and women differently, because also there's a likelihood that is that no one's really benefiting from that mentorship program if one of it— if one of them is a casual kind of coffee situation or is over dinner. And the other is an agendaed meeting, which is minuted and has key objectives for the next meeting, and you have actions. Whereas the other one, and I'm not saying that everyone that goes for coffee with their boss is not having a very professional or action or targeted meeting, but you're more likely to get into the, again, very gendered stuff of men do business and action and women have feelings
[52:27] Al Elliott: Tell us, if, um, someone's listening and they want to find out a bit more about you, where's the best place for them to go?