Mentoring - Are women being fobbed off?

Women working in tech are often advised to acquire mentors, yet despite all the self improvement the proportion of women working in tech remains stubbornly low. Are women being ill advised?

Mentorship programmes are being increasingly offered by technology firms as part of wider DEI programmes designed to increase the representation of women and other minorities in tech.

Women working at all levels of the technology sector - particularly those on the lower rungs who are seeking promotion - have long been advised to seek out mentors, and informal women's networks have been operating for years. Women are usually eager to share knowledge with one another, and to pass that knowledge on to more junior colleagues. On the whole, women working in tech want more women working in their field, and most commit plenty of their own time and energy to any activities designed to increase the diversity of the sector.

Mentoring isn't a gendered activity. Plenty of male tech employees are mentored and function as mentors themselves. If it's done well, mentoring can help to equip junior employees to overcome some of the challenges they encounter, find their strengths, work on their weaknesses and boost confidence. However, recent statistics on how much of a difference mentoring makes are in short supply. Various articles on the importance of mentoring for women quote statistics that both mentor and mentee are more likely to win promotions, better pay and improved career satisfaction. Which sounds great until you realise that the source of these statistics appears to be a study by Sun Microsystems which was conducted in 2006.

Even this 16-year-old study provided negligible evidence of mentoring helping women gain leadership skills. The proportion of tech roles held by women is around 27% overall but the proportion of women in leadership roles is much smaller. Women account for just just 15% of CTOs and 9% of tech CEOs.

The statistics on VC funding for woman led tech start ups are even worse. Women founders raised just 1.1% of overall VC funding in 2021. 49% of female founders felt that being a woman negatively impacted their chances of raising capital.

Whatever women are being advised to do, it isn't helping them get equal representation at the executive tech table.

Change the culture not the woman

There are plenty of reasons that the advice given to women in technology about mentoring although usually given in the best of faith, might need to be qualified. Advice to "find a mentor," might be meted out with the expectation that mentors advise on how to navigate organisational obstacles to advancement, but it also suggests that the candidate needs improving. That might or might not be true in any given individual case but the fact that mentoring programmes are sold so heavily to women, as well as people of colour, LGBTQ people and other groups which still constitute a minority in tech, implies that the structural and systemic barriers to their progression are ones that they have the power and responsibility to remove.

This implicit acceptance that women are at least partly responsible for their own under representation is stubbornly persistent. A similar message can be found in denials of the existence of structural racism. Whilst many minorities take these messages on board, work with mentors to improve leadership skills (and often use covering behaviour), they are all working within the parameters of traditional notions of leadership - parameters set primarily by the middle-class white men who continue to dominate executive tables.

This suggests that despite the DEI messages being broadcast on all channels, many tech employers still haven't got their heads around the concept that, if they want to increase the diversity of their organisations as they claim, it's the leadership model and culture that has to change, rather than the minorities being disadvantaged by it.

Are mentoring schemes then just a way of tech employers kicking the can down the road when it comes to diversity? Unless mentors have some power and can therefore act as advocates and sponsors as well as mentors, it looks as if women, and other under-represented communities are being fobbed off with mentorship programmes in lieu of the more difficult organisational and cultural changes which are needed for the tech workforce to become genuinely more diverse.

At a recent diversity summit, Deepali Nangia, Partner at Speed Invest stated during a panel discussion on female founders that that women are "over mentored and under-capitalised."

However, Milly Batchelor, Youth Banking Customer Journey Team, NatWest Group and WITA Rising Star of 2021 disagrees:

"Scottish Financial Enterprise is made up of a senior board of leaders and then we have our Young Professionals Committee. I asked the board for a mentorship deal. If our board say that there is a topic that they need help with, I take it to the leadership board and one of them will take that request on."

"We've also developed a peer mentorship programme for young professionals that can sign up to as mentees or mentors or both. The idea is building up your skills as either a mentor or mentee but I also want to encourage this culture of young professionals lifting each other up. It's not always a competition and you can learn from people at the same level as you, and people that are less senior than you."

It's a good point. Career progression doesn't have to be a zero-sum game.

Mentors and Sponsors - Women need both

If mentoring is to be a genuinely useful exercise in terms of increasing diversity, it needs to be accompanied by sponsorship. Women need sponsors - somebody with power who will use it to help them progress and fight their corner at a senior level. That women are over mentored and under sponsored is an idea that's being discussed more openly in a variety of forums, and it needs to be discussed far more if the status quo is to shift.

Milly Batchelor defines the difference between mentors and sponsors.

"Both are important, and a mentor can become a sponsor, but they are different. A sponsor is someone in a leadership team who is putting you forward saying, ‘what about this person for this opportunity?' They're saying your name when you're not in the room. You'd like to think that would happen anyway, but you realise that actually you need to influence that, it won't just happen."

Alina Timofeeva, Associate Parter, Oliver Wyman, on the judging panel at this years' Women in Technology Excellence Awards and herself both a mentor and mentee, agrees.

"As a mentor you are more, ‘I've done this, I'm good at it, this is how I approached it, what are your questions?' You try to go through the situation together with a person but it's still a little bit distant. A sponsor will ideally push for your goals and aspirations."

Like Batchelor, Timofeeva believes that young people need both mentors and sponsors, and also raises the point that corporate sponsorship programmes don't always meet their objectives first time round and should therefore be flexible.

"I believe that ideally sponsors shouldn't just be assigned people, they need to really care about what you do. It's hard to click with somebody straight away when you start at a company. At one employer the person who hired me came to me after three months and told me he wanted to be my career counsellor and that worked well. But that isn't always the case and in some companies you are assigned a sponsor.

If you join a company and get assigned somebody and it works out, that's good. But if it doesn't work out, then there should be flexibility about finding someone else."

Batchelor also emphasises the importance of flexibility on all sides if mentorship programmes are to bring maximum benefit.

"Mentoring others is hugely important, but I also think it's important to have different types of mentor. Maybe someone that's similar to you, and someone who you really look up to? But you also need someone who is completely different to you, who challenges you and gets you to think in a different way. I was trying to get across to our young professionals that mentorship isn't a marriage. I think new people into our industry get scared of asking someone to mentor them because they don't know what they want to talk about. But you can have a one-off session with a mentor. You might not need another one or you might want to go back in a couple of months. It's not like you're with them forever! In fact, if a mentor does their job well, they'll get you to a place where you don't necessarily need ongoing sessions."

Mentoring can be helpful and constructive for everyone who engages in any aspect of it, but women should be careful and always ask themselves where the power is. By all means reach out to a mentor - but ask for a sponsor too.

Computing and CRN are hosting the Women in Tech Festival live in London on 3 November and digitally on 9 November.

Join us to learn how the industry can keep championing diversity and make positive changes. Find your sense of belonging as we bring together the tech industry to collaborate, learn, and grow.

Find out more: Women In Tech Festival

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