Who will mentor our sons? - Women's Agenda

Who will mentor our sons?

I was invited to speak at a PwC International Women’s Day event last Friday on the subject of my career challenges. As I am an advocate of role modeling as positive reinforcement I readily accepted the opportunity. There were 150 people in the audience, including a few men, and I applaud them for their interest in improving the conditions for female equality in the workplace.

It was the subject of mentoring that appeared to pique their interest. From the questioning and comments after the speech it was clear that there are women who would like to have a mentor but have no idea how to find one.

I mentioned that I mentor a younger woman in the advertising industry. A young woman in the audience wanted to know how my mentoring relationship came about. I explained that a senior woman working with my mentee selected me for her. She knew that we would work well together. She did the same for four more women and one man in the organisation. The mentors she chose are a mixture of women and men.

The most important consideration is that the mentor be someone outside of your organisation with experience that can add value to your own.

Following the lunch I stopped off for a coffee so I could respond to some emails before my next appointment. One of the few men in the audience for my PwC talk approached me with a further question about mentoring. He wondered if it would be more difficult for men to access a mentor. He made the point that he thought the nature of the one-on-one relationship might be something that would more readily seem natural for women.

It was a good point and one that I have often thought about with regard to my two sons. If the arrangement is to be a success then the mentee needs to accept advice and guidance from the mentor. I would hope that the millennial generation of men will accept there are some skills they don’t have and seek assistance as they climb the corporate ladder. It might make them more effective leaders when they get to the top.

The very idea of a man asking for guidance is almost the complete opposite of everything that is generalized to be true about men. One of the most common reasons given for why there are more men than women in leadership roles is that men are more likely to say they have a capability that they don’t have. Women on the other hand are increasingly seeking out education, training and now mentoring before they will take on a role they are not experienced in.

But with the surge in capability of young women graduates, advances in flexible working arrangements that will retain more women in middle-management roles and the female charge toward leadership roles, the young men entering the workforce in the near future may struggle to keep up. They will need to seek mentors and other strategies that will otherwise provide women with a competitive advantage. We are pushing for gender equality, not gender dominance.

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