The evidence, accidentally uncovered, unhinged my jaw in surprised incredulity.

I am open to the unexpected just as long as it circles my expectations with a close, concentric hug.

Tom and I have worked together, laughed, battled life’s odds. We know each other. My Tom would not do this.

But it turns out he is one of several million men with this habit in the U.S. alone.

The needles came first, discovered in the basket next to his beloved leather armchair. Then, the hard evidence in black and white lodged under the cushion: “Knitting with Balls: A Hands-on Guide to Knitting for the Modern Man.”

Goodness gracious, great balls of, well, wool.

My notion of Tom in particular, and Modern Man in general, was wickedly cleft by knitting. So, to the drop stitch of my shocked ignorance, I had to purl a self-discovery: gender bias.

Our insurance industry, global reach and substantial scale notwithstanding, is a tight-knit community. Communities rely on the premise of belonging—and of course every “us” has its “them.” Conscious discrimination and bias regarding “us” and “them” has been explicitly challenged in a sizable chunk of the world. In our businesses, we have had decades of (legal, social, moral and strategic) imperatives, prompts and incentives to confront conscious bias.

No leading-edge insurer, reinsurer or intermediary would tolerate deliberate bias in its ranks.

The knotty problem—a rather large knot—is the relatively paltry impact of substantial investments in diversity and inclusion on C-suite participation ratios, whether of gender, race, sexual orientation or physical ability.

The problem, it seems, is not retrograde thinking but no “thinking.” I intend this “unthinking” thesis in two ways.

First, as in my reaction to Tom’s hobby, I was unaware of my bias. Unconscious biases accrue through implicit learning. All communities have them, cue them, accrue them and unwittingly imbue them.

Second, finding these biases and investigating them consciously demands that we think and think again, freshly, about strategies to fight them. To rephrase Einstein, we must jettison the kind of thinking that created the problem.

Usually it helps to see what you are fighting, so increasing awareness about our unconsciously learned—and even biologically encoded—preferences and predispositions is indispensable.

When it comes to gender bias, the “men knit, really?” reaction illustrates how we all share, to different degrees, subconscious taxonomies of attributes and actions based on gender. For example, abundant research studies, recent and decades-old, disclose emphatically a tension between our perceptions of “femininity” and our archetypal perceptions of “leadership.” Instinctively, we positively align male characteristics and traditional leadership attributes: forceful, self-confident, decisive, aggressive, hard-hitting, tough, ambitious and so forth.

Conversely, these same “winning attributes” tend to be construed negatively when manifest in women—read self-promoting for self-confident and pushy for ambitious. Words such as tough or aggressive resonate differently—to both men and women—if attached to a woman.

A comparative skim of adverbs and adjectives deployed in press coverage of female and male leaders evidences persuasively that what we mean when we say something depends not only on the word but the gender of the subject.

Why, one wonders, did Meir, Thatcher and Merkel all earn the moniker “The Iron Lady”? It suggests again a perceived dichotomy between the feminine and the leader that necessitates some exceptional metallurgical explanation.

The preoccupation with gender also misses so much material. These leaders garnered strengths and insights, encountered hostility and prejudice for their non-gender attributes as well—class, ethnicity, religion, physical appearance, emotional quotient and so forth. This is no knitting pattern for beginners. There are many interwoven threads to be unspooled.

That women lead, communicate and negotiate differently is trite science. That men and women interpret behavior, infer meaning and elicit signals through gender-based filters is not controversial. What to do about it, however, might be.

The double-entendre is more than you think. The premise is that women can, and should, circumvent the obstacles created by subtle, and not so subtle, disparities in perception. In the extreme, if women cannot beat “them,” they can adopt the tactics, traits and practices that resonate well for and among men. Win like a man. I have spoken to women leaders who are intractable that this is the only realistic option on an individual level and others who decry it as inauthentic and a concession too far to the status quo.

Whatever your view, at an organizational level, a context that causes women to “cop out” or “opt out” wastes human potential; it affirms the misapprehension that attributes and behaviors considered masculine are, in fact, preeminently desirable leadership characteristics and a male tendency.

Two uncomfortable truths poke jauntily through these perceptions like Tom’s knitting needles. First, there is no credible evidence that women’s gamut of leadership styles and capabilities are lesser than men’s. None. Indeed, a confluence of influential thinkers assert that many qualities we admire as feminine—amongst them empathy, collaboration, intuition and caring—are the superlative assets of a 21st century leader.

Tom walked in and one eyebrow went up. His eyes leveled mine. A partner in his firm had introduced him to knitting and now he loved it. He was working on an elaborate sculptural scarf for his wife. A friend with a micro-brewery hosted a “Yarn & Yards” night once a month—beer and knitting, an innovative juxtaposition.

Someone asked Tom clumsily if he was gay. (Whoa, a hat-trick, a bias wrapped in a preconception inside an assumption.) His urbane reply was “unlikely,” as he knitted only occasionally, but he wondered about his “maiden” aunt Celia, a prodigious knitter. The interlocutor was bemused. Celia and her civil partner thought it hilarious.

My own reflex about man-knitting is a clear case of thinking constrained by context. For most of my life, knitting was a female preserve—just as executive roles in our insurance industry have been predominantly male preserves. I missed the fact that for a decade or more there has been a resurgence of men knitting. We miss change in front of us when we are certain of our knowledge.

I did not know that for most of its history, knitting was a male occupation. English medieval guilds honored it. Elizabeth I so prized this intellectual capital she denied patents to the inventor of the knitting machine. American pioneers and cowboys did it around the campfire. Pragmatic. In the first World War, schoolboys knitted for “victory” and feet in Flanders’ trenches. Manly. Patriotic.

The insight is that knitting and the skills it requires have not changed. The gender association is simply a bias born of my narrow circle of experience and reference. Each of the above contexts created assumptions and a supporting narrative.

Last year marked some acute successes in women’s leadership achievements. The chronic problems of disparity endure, but the commitment to overcoming contextual obstacles to full inclusion, participation and leadership impact for women has never been greater.

Is it urgent enough? Probably not. Is there a cohesive pan-industry platform interrogating this and other challenges of diversity and inclusion? Not yet. And yet, our industry’s future resilience and power to innovate cry out for a rich and varied fabric of talent and a broad array of leadership archetypes. We have not come far enough, but things are happening.

Now is the time for bold change. Our industry, albeit unevenly and sometimes with unseemly patience, does strive to reinvent our context: how we work, how we lead and how we are led. Counter-proverbially, now is absolutely not the time to “stick to our knitting,” unless of course, dear Tom, you are a man with “goodness gracious, great balls of yarn.”