Originally published here.

Women-focused mentoring programs are often cited as an important tool to help address gender inequality at work. Despite their popularity, there remain questions about how useful they are at improving women’s career trajectories or transforming gender demographics at the organizational or industry level. A frequent critique of current women-focused mentoring efforts is that they reflect and uphold neoliberal feminism and have shifted from collective sup-port to an individualized focus on competition and accruinghuman and social capital. These programs encourage women to internalize neoliberal subjectivities and prescribe individual change while shoring up ideas about meritocracy that are utterly divorced from gender. I discuss how feminist mentoring, which takes central tenets of feminism including focusing on collective action and organizational change, can serve as a countermeasure to neoliberal feminism and how this form of mentorship can help address gender inequality at work. 

Women’s mentorship is a common prescription for addressing gender inequality in the workplace. As work has transformed over the past several decades, informal networking and mentoring, as well as formal diversity programs that have a mentorship component, are frequently touted as routes to career success for women. Yet, questions remain regarding whether current models of mentorship can truly address issues leading to gender inequality at work, particularly in today’s neoliberal workplace, and if there are other mentoring options available that can truly challenge oppressive conditions. In this article, I review the literature on women’s mentorship programs, including their limitations for addressing gender inequality, and present feminist mentoring as an alternative that prioritizes transformative change rather than just individualized accomplishment. While gender inequality at work had traditionally been shaped by the ideal worker trope, in which employees were expected to be completely devoted to their job and lacking any outside responsibilities (Acker, 1990), under neoliberalism, we have witnessed the requirements for workers shift dramatically. Few jobs today fit the lifelong “company man” model (Neely, 2020; Smith, 2010; Williams et al., 2012). Instead, workers are expected to constantly work towards developing their skillset, personal brand, and professional network so that they can change positions and organizations in order to maximize career outcomes (Neely, 2020). One of the most popular pieces of career advice is to enhance one’s network by identifying a mentor (Neely, 2020; Williams et al., 2012). These mentors can help workers learn the ropes within an organization or industry, as well as provide support for new opportunities such as promotions or jobs elsewhere.

Mentorship has also been suggested as a way to address larger issues of gender inequality in the workplace. As women have been found to have less robust professional networks (Ibarra, 1990), mentors are expected to serve an important role in women’s achievement at work. The need for mentorship is frequently cited in articles and books like Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean in: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead that tell women they need a mentor in order to achieve success. Despite the popularity of mentorship programs, some suggest that the emphasis on mentoring is less about women’s empowerment than a way of performing neoliberal subjectivities through a new, neoliberal form of feminism emphasizing freedom, personal responsibility, self-reliance, and competition, and encouraging young women to focus on aspiration, success, attainment, and personal enjoyment (Baker & Brewis, 2020; McRobbie, 2007, 2013;Neely, 2020; Rottenberg, 2014). Under neoliberal feminism, women gain empowerment, not through collective action and changes to the social structure, but via success in the job market (Mickey, 2019a). Due to these changes, mentorship becomes less about transforming the workplace than a means of benefitting organizations and industries. Mentorship helps new workers become socialized into the organization as women become a new kind of ideal worker who devotes all their time and attention to their career to demonstrate they deserve their mentor’s time and energy, as well as any opportunities offered by the organization (Petrucci, 2020).

Mentorship programs are also popular because they allow organizations and industries to appear to support diversity in their workplaces. As the lack of women and minority workers and managers continues to make headlines and sometimes leads to legal action, organizations have turned to diversity programming. These programs frequently feature a mentorship component and are touted as proof that these organizations are committed to diversifying their workplaces. While mentoring and other diversity work has been shown to increase the number of women and people of color in managerial roles (Kalev et al., 2006), others remain skeptical, claiming these programs merely serve to gain positive public relations attention and rarely do much to transform workplaces into more gender and racially equitable spaces (Dashper, 2017; O’Neil et al., 2011). Nevertheless, women are now expected to both find mentors and to act as mentors themselves, adding another “invisible” task to women’s duties at work. Do these critiques mean that mentorship should be abandoned as a strategy for addressing gender inequality at work? Not necessarily. In the following sections, this article examines the forms women’s mentorship programs have taken and their evolution over time.1 It then reviews the kinds of gains such programs offer for individual women, organizations, and industries. This section is followed by a discussion of recent critiques of these programs, including claims that they are thoroughly neoliberal in both form and function. The article concludes by offering a new path for women’s mentorship through overtly feminist mentorship and provides suggestions for how to make women’s mentorship programs more feminist in scope.

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