Mentoring for Women Academics: What Works

For decades now, mentoring has been hailed as an important workplace learning and career development activity for women and men across a variety of organizational contexts including universities and schools, hospitals, corporations, government departments, and not-for-profit and community-based establishments. Since the 1970s, there has been a recognition that mentoring has great potential to enhance the learning and career outcomes of women and, for this reason, there has been a proliferation of formal mentoring programs established to support them. These formal mentoring programs for women are ubiquitous in universities in Australia and overseas. Their purpose ranges from providing women with career planning support, to socializing them into the role of academic, to developing their learning and specific skills in research and/or teaching. A recent development in the literature has been the argument for sponsorship for women academics rather than mentoring based on the assumption that the former is primarily associated with enhancing career outcomes while the latter tends to be concerned with psychosocial development. This chapter reviews the research and literature on mentoring for women in the academy in order to gain a better insight into its nature, purpose, scope, and benefits and challenges. It also considers some of the theoretical literature that has impacted upon and shaped its conceptualizations. The position taken in the chapter is that women in academe are likely to require multiple forms of mentoring and the specific type and focus will depend on their personal circumstances, interests, and needs.