Read on Twitter
1. On mentoring as an initiative to drive gender equity for #womenInSTEM (and NB folk), a thread
2. Mentoring in many forms - peer to peer, formal & informal programs - is an important strategy to support #womenInSTEM, BUT...
3. Mentoring is not the silver bullet that will deliver gender parity in STEM. Programs are typically aimed at ECRs and women beginning their careers or returning from a career break. This is great! But what about more senior women?
4. Yes, mid and senior women also benefit from mentoring, but alone mentoring is not sufficient. Active sponsorship is needed. I.e. I need someone with influence to advocate for me when I am not in the room. Some mentors are also sponsors
5. Secondly, running a mentoring program is a relatively simple exercise for organisations who want to check the 'women in STEM' box compared with addressing systematic inequities (more later). BUT...
6. Unless we collect robust, longitudinal data from both mentors and mentees, we cannot assess the effectiveness of these programs (see @MezMcK's recent paper) https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1002/ajs4.142
7. And control data, PLEASE! How can be know an intervention is effective without a control group to compare to?? And because we are scientists after all
8. Thirdly, mentoring is another "fix the women" stopgap.
STOP
FIXING WOMEN
No amount of mentoring will address un/conscious bias & structural inequities in the system.
Ping @corporatefox https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34606908-stop-fixing-women
STOP
FIXING WOMEN No amount of mentoring will address un/conscious bias & structural inequities in the system.
Ping @corporatefox https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34606908-stop-fixing-women
9. Mentoring as a solution to gender equity also shifts responsibility from organisations to individuals (mentors and mentees). Again, ignores underlying structural inequities.
