Some sectors are worse than others, notably the UK finance industry, but so marked is the exclusion of women from management generally in the UK that some academics are calling it institutional sexism.
Can mentoring help to solve the problem? Gill Maxwell, senior lecturer in HR management at Glasgow Caledonian Business School, says yes.
Maxwell recently assessed a pilot formal mentoring programme in Clydesdale Bank, part of the international National Australia Group, exploring both clients’ and mentors’ points of view. She found the programme was highly successful in addressing gender imbalance in the workplace.
Joined-up thinking
One of the most striking things about the existing body of research, according to Maxwell, is that the literature on women and career development doesn’t really touch on mentoring, while the literature on mentoring doesn’t overtly mention gender equality.
“What I’ve tried to achieve is some joined-up thinking,” she says. Her aim is that mentoring programmes will be seen not just in terms of learning and development but as organisational impact initiatives because of what they can achieve for equality.
Jennifer de Vries and colleagues made some headway in demonstrating this in 2006, Maxwell explains. “Interestingly, de Vries’ emphasis was on the impact of mentoring on mentors, and these mentors said there were significant benefits for them as well as the clients. Moreover, because these mentors were brilliantly positioned to effect organisational change, there were benefits of mentoring for the organisation itself.
“De Vries concluded that long-term mentoring in a formal programme had the potential to be an effective change intervention. Until 2006, I think that was under-recognised and what I wanted to do was build on this in analysing further how mentoring programmes could contribute to improving gender balance in management,” she says.
Same difference
As a context for understanding the need for mentoring to achieve this, Maxwell points to research on gendered career perceptions. “Initially there was the Sex Discrimination Act 30-odd years ago, which had the objective broadly to treat women the same as men.
But a lot of studies since then show that while there is indeed a lot of sameness, there are nuances of difference too – differences we can’t ignore. Things such as how males are more likely to articulate their career ambitions and successes in a tangible way, whereas women are more likely to do it tentatively.”
There are plenty of other examples. Principal among them are some of the findings of Kate Holmes and colleagues, who discovered last year that enjoying their job and having friendly colleagues was more important to women than men; making good use of their skills and qualifications was slightly more important to men than women; and that men felt more optimistic than women about their career prospects.
“These differences in self-perception are important because they are one type of gendered perception that may influence career development,” explains Maxwell. “Another type may be that male and female values may be different or that women make sense of their careers in particular ways that can be different from men.”
Then there’s the fact that management has been strongly associated with males and masculinity; something heavily backed up by research. That’s not to say things haven’t changed. “Research has found that male managers’ views of women in management have improved in the past 30 years or so since the introduction of sex discrimination legislation,” she says.
Nonetheless, where the work context and culture is male-centred there can be negative implications for women’s experience of jobs and career opportunities, which Maxwell believes emphasises the need for meaningful mentoring for women at work.
Soft skills
Also key to understanding how mentoring can help achieve equality (and consequently is something that underpinned Maxwell’s work with Clydesdale Bank) is an awareness of what existing research tells us about the impact of mentoring on women.
Among the many benefits widely reported for male and female clients are enhanced managerial skills, and soft skills such as navigating culture, information sharing, critical reflection and personal learning and development.
Also accepted is the development of even softer skills, such as clients having their sense of self-worth affirmed, receiving advice, support and perspective, and ideas sharing. Meanwhile, for mentors, reported benefits include personal learning and gratification, enhanced managerial skills, positive learning and development and even career outcomes, as well as networking and reflection opportunities.
Examples of organisational benefits include keeping managerial knowledge in the organisation, engaging high performers, organisational development and organisational change – as outlined by De Vries.
The good news for Clydesdale Bank (which had to provide mainly male mentors for its female clients because of a shortage of top-level women) is that the research shows the sex of the mentor need not matter when it comes to career development facilitation.
That said, research shows female mentors tend to offer more personal and emotional guidance than male mentors and the most important three mentoring behaviours – championing, acceptance and confirmation – are slightly more pronounced among women.
Other literature states that female mentor-client dyads provide advice and support, in particular on organisational culture and politics, building female support networks and self-knowledge. Crucially, however, these are all slight, rather than significant, gender accents.
Julie Wade, diversity manager, people and culture at National Australia Group, makes no bones about why she wanted to pilot a formal developmental mentoring programme for women at Clydesdale Bank. “We recognised that we have a glass ceiling and we wanted to allow women to break through that with confidence,” she says, explaining that the company had identified female clustering at and below first-line management.
Wade knew Maxwell wanted to assess such a programme from its inception. “For us, it was fantastic to have it externally evaluated. We hadn’t done anything like this before in a formal, structured way and getting an impartial, balanced view on it was ideal,” Wade says.
Indeed, integral to the planning of the Clydesdale scheme; which was piloted last year as one of six strategic HR initiatives in the organisation’s business case for implementing a UK diversity strategy, was evaluation, not least so the bank could roll out the scheme at a later date. To this end, 23 in-depth interviews were conducted by Maxwell with six clients and six mentors, representing half of the pilot scheme participants.
A sense of achievement
One of the things that struck Maxwell most was the combination of the awareness of imbalance at senior levels among clients and mentors alike, and the claim that promotion was never gender-biased.
“You had people saying there’d always been more males at the top, yet everyone was promoted fairly. But how could it be fair? It didn’t quite add up, but in their own heads people justified it, which basically comes back to women often personalising their reasons for not getting on,” she says.
What the mentoring scheme did, explains Maxwell, was enable the clients to start recognising this. “I’ve a sense of achievement and accomplishment to be selected and have the opportunity to take part,” one woman said.
Meanwhile, some mentors were able to spot subtle problems in the working culture. One said: “There’s still too much of a culture of working long hours… a disconnect around what is said on work-life balance and what happens.”
Notably, the mentor (in this case female) implicitly connected enabling women’s career development to perceptions about successful manager characteristics and to masculinity in management.
Conclusions
In her official report, Maxwell reached four main conclusions about the pilot, although she says now she would add a fifth.
One, the programme was considered overall by clients and mentors as being very successful in supporting career development.
Two, in turn, this implied that effective formal mentoring actively supported the career development of women in management, and thus increased equality.
Three, the mentors considered that they too benefited from the programme. One mentor concluded: “It’s nice to know we, as a company, have looked at it and done something about it. I’m proud to work for such a company.”
Four, permeating the findings were gendered perceptual differences across clients and mentors about mentoring and career development. “The reality was [the clients] were clearly more ambitious afterwards; they were just tentative about saying so. Getting females to categorically say, ‘Yes, I feel more ambitious’ will take more time,” Maxwell says.
Her fifth, and later, conclusion was that clients were now becoming mentors, demonstrating potential for schemes such as this to grow powerfully.
“In fact, since rolling out our pilot scheme, we have 110 clients and 130 mentors working together, with more planned,” Ward says. “That’s just in one business unit. There’s another five yet to take it on board. You could say it has had a true domino effect, especially since people can now book themselves on to the scheme, rather than being invited. Everyone thinks it’s wonderful.”
Learning points
- Define your objectives – know what you want out of the programme.
- Put in the groundwork. Clydesdale ran planned workshops for their dyads before the mentoring began.
- Quality of contact time is more important than quantity for the clients. Some of the mentor-client dyads were geographically distant, but the relationship still worked well.
- Feedback should be given to mentors on the impact of their role.
- Cross-gender dyads mean men could learn more about women at work.
- Mentoring enhances women’s confidence.
- Recognise the stages of development in the mentoring relationship.
- Place emphasis on evaluation (ideally external, which provides objectivity and openness) so that you learn lessons before rolling out.
Volume 4, Issue 1