Gender Bias in Mentoring: How to Inoculate against it
Mentoring can support the career development of junior employees and help their organizations thrive. But while mentoring has benefits, female protégés are at a disadvantage.
The investment that mentors make to support their mentees’ career is based on the potential they see in the junior employee. But these judgements, researchers Belle Rose Ragins et al write in the Journal of Vocational Behavior, are “susceptible to implicit biases and stereotypes….This is particularly problematic for women as they are held to higher standards in assessments of their advancement potential.”
Because women must outperform men to have the same opportunities, female employees are less likely to develop informal mentoring relationships than their male counterparts are, Ragins et al write. Another barrier is that “white male executives don’t feel comfortable reaching out informally to young women and minority men,” Frank Dobbin and Alexandra Kalev write in Harvard Business Review (Fall 2020: 55 - 61).
Of the estimated 75 percent of professionals seeking mentors, only 37 percent secure one, Ragins et al write. Women are disproportionately excluded, researchers Eila Prats-Brugat et al write in the International Journal of Evidence Based Coaching and Mentoring. The disparity in informal mentoring is a particular problem in male-dominated professions such as architecture, engineering, and construction.
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Detail of “Zwei Personen,” c. 1922
Organizations can equalize access to mentors by establishing formal, mandatory mentoring programs. While such programs can ensure that every junior employee has a mentor, the quality of the mentorship may still vary based on the mentor’s perceptions of their protégé’s potential—especially if that potential is assessed with unconscious bias. To address these short-comings, organizations can take the following steps, Ragins et al suggest:
Provide training to mentors to clarify their role. By definition, most mentees will be average—but mentors must provide their best guidance, support, and respect to all participants.
“[O]rganizations can recognize and remove subtle reinforcers that equate effective mentoring with protégé advancement,” the researchers suggest. “Instead, they can publicly acknowledge the value of mentoring for retention, job engagement, career satisfaction, and work-life balance.”
The success (or failure) of a protégé should have no impact on the mentor’s own career. People selected for the role must be invested in the junior employee’s successes, not their own.
Although mentors might believe they are equally invested in all protégés regardless of their perceived potential, research has shown this is rarely the case. Mentors should receive training to alert them to “relational blind spots” so that they can overcome these.
Mentor training is essential since researchers Ragins et al found that “female protégés were seen as having less potential and experienced less respect when assigned a male rather than a female mentor.” The solution is not to overburden senior women with a disproportionate share of protégés, but rather to make all mentors aware of their potential biases and how to rise above them. Think you don’t need training? Take a free implicit bias test—you might be surprised.
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