A few days ago, a newspaper item caught my eye. For the first time, young men entering the UK employment market were on average earning less than young women. I wondered: “Does this mean we are finally achieving a rebalancing of the gender pay gap?”

Sadly, it’s a reflection of failures in education and social integration in the wake of Covid to meet the needs of young males. The danger now is that the pressure to achieve gender pay equality eases off as the focus on disadvantage shifts. We might even lose some of the gains achieved so far.

What’s needed now is a rethink of how we approach gender inequality from cradle to grave. What combinations of educational, social and other support will enable both males and females to fulfil their potential, set and pursue ambitions and benefit society as a whole? Perhaps we need to move from focusing on inequalities to creating conditions, where equality is a natural outcome of an environment that nurtures talent in all its multitude of forms.

This is where mentoring has a gigantic potential role to play. Imagine a world where having a mentor (or a series of mentors) was as normal as having a parent or sibling. Where continuous learning and reflective practice were the norm.

CCMI has ambitions to help make this vision a reality. Among our ongoing projects are:

  • Our long/term experiments to enable schoolchildren to learn to be coaches and mentors. Currently we have two pilots: one in the UK with 11- to 12-year-olds mentoring 9- to 10-year olds. Our medium-term aim is to create 5 million young mentors globally. Beyond that … to make this kind of education embedded in schools wherever they are.
  • More pilots of our programme to engage people from the top and bottom of an organisation in identifying systemic barriers to inclusion; and then to co-design solutions driven from both above and below.
  • A new book to collect case studies of good practice in mentoring programme management — with an emphasis on programmes for inclusion
  • Our aspiring HR directors programme with the CIPD has placed increasing emphasis on DEI. We are very proud to support this and are looking for opportunities to spread the concept to other countries and other disciplines 

Perhaps within a few decades gender discrimination will be a curious footnote in history books. Maybe we will have learned not to replace one form of discrimination with another. Whether we reach such a state depends on what we do now to value everyone more equally. Mentoring isn’t the whole answer, but we know that it has a big impact on young people, making them more self-aware, more compassionate and more focused on achieving ambitions beyond their own.

© David Clutterbuck 2025