We need men in our office. It pains me to say it, but we actually do. When the closest resemblance to a Y chromosome is the occasional visit from Buddy the dog, you know there’s a problem – even the identical twins I am due to give birth to any minute… are girls!

You may well be thinking what can men bring to the office that women can’t? It’s not about specifics. It’s more about balance. Any workplace is surely enhanced by including people of different perspectives and life experience. Personally, I have led teams of men and women – both have advantages and disadvantages. But the more we grow as a company, the more I am realising that a balance is what’s required.

Communicating this to our HR department of course, was always going to be tricky. In today’s world, we can’t advertise for ‘men only’… or can we?

Price comparison portal GoCompare recently took a stand in efforts to attain gender parity through a suite of measures designed to bring in more female staff; including all-female shortlists, anonymised CV’s and the introduction of software capable of identifying job advert bias…Bingo!

This was my plea to HR. But apparently, I didn’t need it. As it turns out, you can try to bridge the gender gap and the most important thing is to try to encourage more men to apply.

Right, so, how do we do that exactly? Our industry does tend to be more female led but still, we must be able to get some creative thinking, innovative, idea generating men through the door? Well, to date, we haven’t managed it through the usual routes of advertising or social media so it has now become a full on ‘strategy’.

But if all else fails, as a client of mine quite ‘reassuringly’ pointed out ‘at least you have no gender pay gap to address!’… *eye roll*

Seriously though, if you have anyone who you think might fit the bill, please ask them to get in touch!