Workforce Matters: The Club Nobody Admits They're In

You know the moment. A senior figure enters the room — perhaps the CEO, perhaps simply someone with recognized influence — and the atmosphere subtly shifts. People sit up straighter. They showcase their shared interests, whether that’s a sport, a hobby, a viewpoint or a way of seeing the world. It’s rarely conscious. We’re wired to like what feels familiar. That, on its own, isn’t the problem.

The issue is when familiarity turns into protection. We’ve all seen it — recent public scandals have exposed a recurring pattern: long careers, impressive titles and a surrounding ecosystem that didn’t want to know — or didn’t want to risk knowing — what was really going on. What is unsettling is not only the behavior itself, but the number of people willing to overlook it, excuse it or unconsciously mirror it. Proximity to power can be a mighty silencer.

That dynamic isn’t confined to headline-grabbing scandals. It shows up quietly and routinely in everyday workplaces — especially in male-dominated STEM environments. I know this from experience. During an HR investigation earlier in my career, I learned that I had been the subject of private email exchanges among a group of male colleagues within a team I worked alongside — conversations I was never intended to see and whose full content I will never know. Was I a victim? Even writing that feels uncomfortable, excessive and perhaps dramatic. That instinct to minimize, to question whether an experience truly “counts”, is itself revealing. It is one of the ways these behaviors persist.

How Informal Power Networks Silence Women

What I do know is how it landed. It changed how safe I felt, how seriously I believed I was being taken, how isolated I suddenly realized I was. Nothing overt had happened in a meeting, and no dramatic confrontation — there was no single moment you could point to and say that’s it. Just a quiet, cumulative realization that decisions, opinions and judgements about me were being shaped elsewhere — without my involvement.

This is how organizational culture actually operates. When senior leaders are put on pedestals, their behavior becomes a reference point. What they laugh at, what they dismiss, who they interrupt and who they defend all send powerful signals. Others take their cues accordingly. Women tend to spot these patterns early, not because we are more sensitive, but because we are more often on the receiving end of their consequences.

Women in STEM are frequently expected to adapt to these dynamics rather than challenge them. To be easy to work with, to not make things awkward and to read the room and adjust ourselves accordingly. And if we don’t? We are quickly labelled as “difficult” or “not quite the right fit.”  Over time, many leave — quietly, professionally and without naming the real reason for their departure.

What makes these dynamics particularly difficult to address is that they rarely register as misconduct in the traditional sense. They sit in the gray space between what is technically permissible and what is culturally corrosive. Few organizations set out to reward poor behavior, yet systems that rely heavily on informal influence, reputation and senior endorsement often do so by default.

Formal processes are typically designed to investigate discrete incidents rather than patterns. They look for evidence of individual wrongdoing rather than the accumulation of small exclusions, private conversations and unchallenged assumptions. As a result, many women experience harm that is real, sustained and career-limiting, yet difficult to articulate in ways that organizations are equipped to address.

This is compounded in environments where technical expertise and delivery pressure are prioritized over behavioral scrutiny. In STEM, high performers are frequently afforded greater latitude, their behavior excused as intensity, pragmatism or “just how things are done.” Over time, this creates a hierarchy of credibility in which some voices are protected, and others are quietly discounted.

Why Women Leave Male-Dominated STEM Fields

The question for leaders, then, is not simply whether a line has been crossed, but which behaviors are being implicitly endorsed through silence or selective tolerance. Culture is shaped less by stated values than by what is consistently ignored. And when proximity to power determines whose behavior is accepted, the cost is borne by those with the least room to maneuver. 

For women in STEM, the decision to leave is rarely sudden — it is a rational response to a system that has already made its judgment.

This is not a question of villains and heroes. It is about what organizations choose to reward — and what they are prepared to overlook. For leaders genuinely concerned about retaining women in STEM, this is the real work. Not initiatives or slogans, but the uncomfortable examination of whose behavior is excused, whose is scrutinized and why. None of this is hidden. It is happening in plain sight — in meetings, inboxes and leadership behaviors that have been normalized for years.