Does Mentoring Make a Difference for Women Academics? Evidence from the Literature and a Guide for Future Research

1.IntroductionThe relevance of mentoring to support newcomers and minority groups in organizations has been underlined for decades (Allen et al., 2008; Kram, 1983). Mentoring broadly indicates a relationship where a more expert person - the mentor - provides advice to a less expert one - the mentee. Daloz (2012), referring to the character of Virgil in Dante's Divine Comedy, writes that the mentor's role would be that of "engendering trust, issuing a challenge, providing encouragement, and offering a vision for the journey" (Daloz, 2012: 30). There is an aura of mythology around mentoring: the word itself comes from "Mentor," the name of the old sage (personification of the goddess Athena) who took care of the young Telemachus while his father Odysseus was away in the Trojan War.Coming back to the present day, Megginson et al. (2006: 4) define mentoring as, "off-line help by one person to another in making significant transitions in knowledge, work or thinking." Schramm (2004: 64) underlines the developmental aspect of this relationship and adds that the mentor should "challenge the mentee to go beyond the comfort zone." The definition and its extension may appear broad, but they underline the basic features of mentoring. This is that mentoring implies an exclusive relationship in which a more experienced person provides strategic advice to facilitate the professional and personal development of another, less experienced one. When applied to organizations, mentoring should help the mentee to better understand the organizational context and career opportunities, avoid isolation, and access relevant networks. Mullen (2009) noted that the breadth of the definition might be problematic: today the word mentoring is often used interchangeably not only with advising and supervising, but, among others, with coaching, leading, teaching, and socializing, thus making comparisons difficult for scholars and practitioners in studying this process.In this paper, we provide a review of the literature on mentoring, where mentoring is considered as a process to enhance the career trajectory of women in academia and involves a relation beyond supervision, line management and probationary processes. We investigate and clarify the role of mentoring for women academics, and propose a model to guide future research.Academic mentoring is an especially interesting area for building a scholarly contribution. The first literature on mentoring originated in the 1980s, but it was more focused on private organizations than academia. Boyle and Boice (1998) underlined that universities initially showed a "laissez-faire" approach, this meaning that, compared to the private sector, they have been less proactive in promoting mentoring. This has implications on scholarly literature as well. Still nowadays, literature on academic mentoring is highly fragmented. This led Zellers et al. (2008) to argue for the need to build a consistent research agenda, better able to investigate the peculiarities of the academic profession.The main factor making mentoring for women important in universities is that academia has been a male environment for centuries (Bagilhole and Goode, 2001): women are still underrepresented at the more senior levels and in some disciplines (usually the fields related to science, technology, mathematics and medicine, STEMM for short) (EC, 2016). This means that women are often excluded from important networks (van den Brink and Benschop, 2014), even if not directly discriminated (Savigny, 2014). Quinlan (1999) earlier pointed out (and still relevant today) how women in academia often engage in very different career paths compared to men, have less continuity in their CV, and experience more stress and greater isolation. Mentoring, therefore as an instrument to support professional development, should be especially useful to ensure a smoother career path for women.The academic profession presents specificities that might challenge the development and uptake of mentoring. …