Just What is it About Men and Lycra?

Ok - let me get this out of the way, embarrassing as it is. I love Lycra. I'm a self-avowed MAMIL (a middle aged man in Lycra). Have been for some time actually and proud of it too.

It's just great material - no wonder women have been wearing it in ever increasing numbers since Jamie Lee Curtis did her thing. And even if we might look a bit strange wearing it there's strength in numbers which, of course, partly explains the whole cycling craze.

In fact I’m just back from our annual boys' trip to the Dolomites. It's the usual formula; lots of huffing and puffing up various steep inclines on expensive bikes pretending to be young.

Macho mind games on the mountain

And why else do men love doing this stuff? Well, a couple of reasons other than the Lycra. The mind games are fun in a macho kind of way. "Damn that was painful, a lesser man might have stopped but I fought through the pain to reach the top..."

The bonding stuff is pretty "feel-good" as well. Dirty jokes, puerile banter and shared pain all help the camaraderie. And then there's the food. If you're in the saddle for 8 hours a day you can pretty much eat what you like and the more the better.

Some of the hills we scaled are really quite impressive. Clearly the slower you travel up the more time you have to ruminate. Fair to say I did a lot of thinking and here's where my pain addled brain got me...

Macho mind games in business...?

Instead of a "boys trip to the Dolomites" imagine our gang of MAMILS was instead a "typical business run by a board of men". You can see where I'm going and the analogy is actually spookily accurate for the vast majority of businesses.

Now imagine we knew that the trip would be better "more fun, we'd eat nicer food and cycle faster" if we had a few women in the group. That's the gender diversity point. Get a bunch of men and women together and they will be better at nearly everything, business included, than a bunch of men on their own.

Getting gender diversity right

Now just how difficult would a woman find it joining our elite group of cyclists? And how much would we be willing to shift our macho male behaviours to accommodate her? Not much is the harsh truth unless something or someone kicked us into it. That's where the holder of the maillot jaune would need to stand up and tell us what to do whether we liked it or not.

And as for the woman, even with a rousing speech from our leader she would still need to lean in an awfully long way. In doing so she might well have to park lots of her feminine wiles in the bike shed (in all honesty not the best place for them).

So here's my saddle-sore thought of the week

If we want to get gender diversity right then businesses will need to go through some massive cultural shifts. They are very painful and difficult. As for me, well luckily I adopt the position of most men running businesses - I'm just a simple domestique who's never been near the yellow jersey so it's not my problem...

Ben "Bradley" Black