A new global report, Women as Mentors, states the benefits of mentoring to career success, professional growth and development have been widely documented. However at a time when there has been minimal growth of women in executive positions, it reviews why there aren’t more women engaging in mentoring and what women, and organisations, need to do to change this.
Here’s a brief overview of the report.
Individual:
- 78% of women in senior roles have served as formal mentors, yet very few have had a formal mentor of their own (less than 1/3).
- Men seek and offer mentoring more readily while women need to be found and encouraged (Laff, 2009)
- Women need to seek out mentoring for themselves and stop waiting for mentorships to be assigned
- Senior women are willing to mentor if they are asked or are given the opportunity
Organisations:
- The more ingrained mentoring is in the organisation, the more likely women are to be mentors and to accept mentorships.
- Benefit if they “make mentoring contagious” by formalising programs, provide support and training to leaders.
- Formal mentoring programs encourage informal mentoring (1 in 3 senior women are frequently a formal mentor when a formal mentoring program is in place, in contrast to 1 in 5 without a program)
- Organisations with the largest % of C-level women encourage or mandate senior executives to mentor women in lower-level jobs (McKinsey 2010).
