Paul Stokes suggests that women’s mentoring programmes are influenced by their specific context, impacting their design and implementation. This is evident in programmes for women in STEM in Peru and female undergraduates in a UK Business School, where the unique societal and organisational factors shaped the mentoring experience.
Most traditional mentoring programmes are designed to either develop “high fliers” or to remedy structural inequalities due to a range of characteristics — race, gender, sexuality etc. I have been involved in developing and evaluating many mentoring programmes over the last 20 years. There is one recent project which I am particularly proud of: my work in mentoring women in STEM in Peru.
Women’s mentoring in STEM careers in Peru
Working with colleagues with support from the British Council and the National University of San Augustin Arequipa (UNSA), I developed and delivered a women’s mentoring programme between STEM female academics and female undergraduates. This programme was the first of its kind in Peru — our findings and learning from the programme were recently published in an international peer-reviewed journal article1.
The key learning was that all mentoring programmes have a reciprocal relationship between where the programme is located (i.e. within a business or other sort of organisation) and with broader society. Mentoring programmes are both influenced by, and influence, society. In other words, the specific context for the mentoring has a powerful impact on what the mentoring looks like and how it is done.
Women’s mentoring in UK Business schools
This was also the case for another women’s mentoring programme run by my colleague Nikita Bridgeman at Sheffield Hallam University, UK. This, again, has been developed into a journal article written by the two of us. Here, the context was a UK Business School initiative intended to enhance the employability of female undergraduates.
As with the UNSA programme, the context of female business graduates was fundamental to the way that the programme was used and engaged with. Mentees had to be encouraged and supported to reach out to mentors and helped to overcome barriers such as effective communication with mentors, addressing mentor availability and clarity about expected outcomes. This was partly due to its UK context — student mentoring programmes seem to be much more prominent and common in US Business Schools, for example.
The importance of context in mentoring programmes
In summary, whilst there are certainly some core mentoring principles that are common to all mentoring programmes, the impact and importance of context should not be overlooked.
If you are interested in exploring how this work might help you with your mentoring work, please get in touch.
Literature
- Stokes, P., Monti, I. & Larios, M. (2026). Mentoring women in STEM careers: The reciprocal & agentic role of context. Management international, 30(1), 10-19. https://doi.org/10.59876/a-pm17-97nd
