How does Mentoring for Women Help?
Many studies have shown that women are often disadvantaged in the workplace. They are often not paid as much as their male counterparts when performing similar roles and women continue to be vastly underrepresented in senior management positions in proportion to their representation in the workforce.
In terms of career progression, the barriers to entry into higher management position are often referred to as ‘the glass ceiling’. There is considerable evidence that women encounter a ‘glass ceiling’ in management, whatever their industry. The underlying causes for this include discrimination in the workplace, the inability of women to penetrate the ‘old boys’ network’ and the tendency of executives to promote others like themselves.
Experience in Mentoring Women
Coach Mentoring Ltd has considerable experience of designing and developing mentoring programmes to support women through the glass ceiling, in talent management programmes, in male dominated environments and through maternity leave and returning to work. Some of these programmes have included elements of sponsorship, utilisation of male and female role model mentors and an organised networking component. Lis Merrick started her career in mentoring by running a national mentoring programme for women in engineering and construction to support them in progressing their careers in very male dominated environments.
We also offer more general workshops for women to support specific events e.g. International Women’s Day and women’s leadership development, which include a large element of encouraging informal mentoring for women.
Women’s Networking
Networking is a form of development dialogue and has similarities with Mentoring. Many women approach networking rather differently from men. Within organisations, women's informal, personal networks look rather different from those of men, they tend to be further away from the centre of power in the company, and they tend to contain more women.
Women are more relational and less transactional than men in the way they interact with others at work. Women tend to have a much more reciprocal networking culture, less hung-up on trying to impress people in a superficial way, or to work every person in the room by the end of the evening; they see a networking culture more relaxed about sharing knowledge or allowing conversations to meander away from business or professional topics and towards domestic and emotional ones.