Why not look at how we are all similar rather than a unique attribute to explain the leaky pipe? The Swedish government order a study a few years ago in order

Why not look at how we are all similar rather than a unique attribute to explain the leaky pipe? The Swedish government order a study a few years ago in order to explain why the teacher profession are so gender segregated. The study found that initially the applications are almost 50/50 men and women, but then every year men start to leave. Once graduated and starting to work, every year men are a few times more likely to leave the profession than women. They even called it a leaky pipe. They had multiple explanation in order to explain it, like how more academic focus rather than pedagogic helps retain men, and how higher salaries might help, and they also did similar to this study and asked the men who left why they did so. A lot of answers were that the profession did not fit their life, they felt the environment to be alien and uncomfortable, and they didn't feel like they fit in the work culture. What the study also found was that the remaining male teacher that did stay tended to enter specialties such as PE and STEM subject, and away from subjects like langue and social studies. Many who left did so for similar profession outside of the education system such as sport. So here we have women and men, both being described as a leaky pipe, both leaving at similar rates, both describing similar reasons for leaving, both finding specialties where they are not a minority. Could there be a common theory rather than two separate theories to explain this? And the government study had such suggestion. There is research that is now about 50 years old that observed that people who are in an environment as a minority does not feel same confidence in themselves as those being part of the majority. When faced with a failure such as a missed exam, and making a decision to continue, being part of a majority increase the probability of the person continuing. The government study suggested that if you apply this theory over the time frame of a teacher career from the point of student to being a long term employee, what you get is a leaky pipe. It also suggested the solution that mentor ship programs helps in reducing this. I also recall that a while back a women in IT imitative that said that of all their work, what had actually produced results was their mentor program. Seems like a pretty good evidence to me, and as a universal theory it seems pretty good explanation to explain the situation for both men and women.