Understanding, predicting and addressing women’s exits from male-dominated professions: Accelerating progress with an integrative framework

Key digested message The question of why women leave male-dominated professions concerns researchers and practitioners alike. This article proposes a new framework to address this question more systematically. It distinguishes women’s professional exits from their organisational exits and stresses the importance of using multi-level work dissatisfaction data to predict each exit type. It also highlights the moderating role of successive career stages on exit behaviour and champions the significance of gender-comparative analyses in advancing exit-related insights. While researchers can use this framework to identify key (control) variables for future studies, practitioners may draw on it to develop effective retention strategies.