One of the erroneous assumptions I hear most often from managers of other
mentoring programs is that women exclusively want and benefit from
having mentors who are also women. While the SEED Engineering mentoring program’s data show that female mentees have a strong preference
for female mentors, it also shows that SEED’s participants (men and
women mentees) report the same program satisfaction regardless of their
mentor’s gender.
As reported in SEED’s
“5 Years of Mentoring by the Numbers” (by Katy Dickinson, presented
at the October 2006
Grace Hopper Celebration of Women and Computing,
30 pages, PDF format), based on SEED’s data since 2001, there are
three consistent gender patterns with regard to mentor matching in
Sun Engineering:
- More male Mentors are requested by both male
and female Mentees overall. - Female Mentors seem more willing than male
Mentors to accept a Mentee, regardless of
gender. - Female Mentees request twice as many female
Mentors on their Mentor Wish Lists as do male
Mentees.
This week, we had a new question about mentoring and gender: Is
there a substantive difference in reported satisfaction between mentees
with male mentors and those with female mentors?
Tanya Jankot ran a new data analysis over the SEED program’s last six
quarterly reports (244 individual reports, not all participant-mentor
pairs are unique in this sample because some reports are by the same
people in subsequent quarters). There isn’t any real difference in reported satisfaction. The sample size of female participants is smaller than the sample of males (this is Engineering, after all); however,
there is no pattern of satisfaction difference. We checked answers to
two key SEED quarterly feedback report questions:
- Q15: Overall Worth of Meetings with Mentor (1-7 scale, Not
Worthwhile Very Worthwhile) - Q24: Overall Satisfaction with Program (1-7 scale, Not Satisfied
Very Satisfied)
Female SEED participants were a little more satisfied overall than
male participants but only by a few percentage points and nothing
statistically interesting. For example, on Question 15, female
participants reported 92% satisfaction with female mentors and
93% with male mentors. The male range was 88-90%.
For more on the SEED Engineering mentoring program,
see <a href="
http://research.sun.com/SEED
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