KatysBlog

The SEED Engineering mentoring program’s 4-Site term
(for Bangalore, Beijing, Prague, and St. Petersburg
staff, June – December 2007) is 90% matched with
46 mentoring pairs already working together. Many of them
have already asked to take the optional 2 hour phone-in mentoring
facilitation training.

Tanya Jankot and I are preparing for SEED’s next two
worldwide Engineering terms, for Recent Hires and Established
Staff. These will be announced by CTO Greg Papadopoulos
later this month with applications in June. Both worldwide
terms will start in September 2007. I will be putting
together the Recent Hire Selection Committee (usually 3
Sun Distinguished Engineers plus 3 Directors or VPs) in the
next week or so. I will also start inviting speakers for
SEED’s next in-person meeting (to be scheduled in September
or October) in the next few weeks. Busy time!

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

Mentor Matching Cycle

The SEED Engineering mentoring program 4-Site Term (for Bangalore, Beijing, Prague,
and St. Petersburg, running June – December 2007) is now 86% matched (44
mentoring pairs). Starting from the date the first email invitation went out to
a potential mentor, here is a comparison of the matching rate
during the first three weeks of this term and three earlier SEED terms:

* The 4-Site term is not completely matched, so this data
is preliminary.

US vs. Non-US Metrics

It is interesting that even though the 4-Site term is solely made up of
non-US-based participants, the matching rate during the first three weeks of the cycle was
essentially the same as for terms with mixed US-based and non-US-based Sun Engineering
staff. The 4-Site mentor group is different so far in this incompletely
matched term in that there are fewer executive (Director, Vice President, Fellow,
Distinguished Engineer) mentors and more Staff Engineers and Senior Staff Engineer
mentors accepting 4-Site term participants as mentees. (We will not know for
several weeks if this lower executive mentor percentage holds true.)

The lack of difference in mentor matching cycle time is consistent with the lack
of difference in participant satisfaction ratings between mentoring pairs working
in the same geographic area and those working at a distance.
Tanya Jankot just finished publishing her analysis of SEED’s April 2007
quarterly feedback reports. As in prior terms, analysis of the 33 recent reports does not
show significant difference in responses to “Q15: Overall Worth of Meetings with Mentor”
and “Q24: Overall Satisfaction with Program” between participants at a distance from
their mentor and those co-located with their mentor. 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):

• During the past four worldwide SEED Terms,
  68% of the mentoring partnerships have been
  at a distance. “At a distance” may mean on
  opposite coasts of the USA, or it may mean in
  different countries entirely.
• Participants who are co-located with their
  Mentor report that they meet for longer than
  participants who are at a distance from their
  mentor. While mentoring pairs who are at a distance
  do report meeting slightly more often,
  co-located partners appear to spend several
  more hours together overall over the course of
  their relationship.
• Whether participants are co-located or at a distance
  from their Mentor does not have any
  impact on their reported satisfaction with the
  SEED program.

This is interesting because one of the assumptions I often hear about mentoring
is that it works better if the mentor and mentee work in the same local area.
I have heard this assumption from both mentors and mentees within Sun and from
managers of mentoring programs outside of Sun. However, the metrics above
do not support that assumption. Mentors are just as quick to accept a potential mentee
regardless of relative location, and mentees (in our case, the SEED program
pariticipants who returned quarterly reports) say they are as satisfied with the
mentoring relationship whether their mentor is local or at a distance.

For more on the SEED Engineering mentoring program,
see <a href="
http://research.sun.com/SEED