Mentoring gives women an edge before they enter the workforce

Women are under-represented in leadership roles in the workplace and society, but a growing number of initiatives in schools and universities are helping to address this.

Loreto Kirribilli girls school principal Dr Nicole Archard.

The adage “you can’t be what you can’t see” is used to encapsulate the fact that a lack of role models is part of the reason that women are under-represented in leadership roles in the workplace and society.

To this Nicole Archard adds: “You can’t be what you don’t believe.”

The principal of Loreto Kirribilli girls’ school in Sydney says this is about self-concept.

“If girls first themselves don’t think they’re capable of filling those roles, it doesn’t matter how many mentors you have in place. It’s not going to change their perception,” she says.

And just as mentoring helps provide women with role models, it can also help develop girls’ self-concept, says Dr Archard, who researched mentoring while undertaking a doctorate in women and leadership and girls’ education.

The school provides formal mentoring programs, where Year 10 students mentor a Year 7 student, and Year 6 students mentor new students to the junior school.

The programs teach the mentors how to be a good mentor and the mentees the importance of mentoring, being open to making connections and getting feedback.

Support networks

“You’re also establishing in that relationship the importance of girls supporting other girls, which then translates post-school to women supporting women,” she says.

“Men tend to do that better traditionally than women, because that’s how they work their way up through organisations.

“It’s who you know, who you’re buddies with, who do you drink with after work. You get all those opportunities, which then lead to promotions.

“Sometimes, where women are missing from those leadership roles in the workforce, it is because they’re not doing that same mentoring in that same way.”

But Dr Archard says mentoring is really only part of the solution.

“You can mentor someone in the workplace till the cows come home, but (it’s ineffective) unless you actually provide opportunities for that staff member to develop their skills or to lead particular projects,” she says.

Career opportunities

Brisbane’s St Margaret’s Anglican Girls School has a slightly different formal mentoring program, in which Year 11 and 12 girls are matched with past students working in careers that the girls wish to pursue.

“Current students choose subjects that they study, then they choose eventually the university course they’d like to study, but sometimes they don’t know a lot about it,” principal Ros Curtis says.

The program is voluntary and has met with a good response, with 65 students from a cohort of 160 choosing to take part this year.

They have four online mentoring sessions, spread across the school year, that will help the students to make a more informed decision about their study and career choices.

“They might talk about the university studies, some of the things about their industry, what they’ve learned along the way, what their job actually entails – a lot of people don’t know what people actually do on a day-to-day basis,” Curtis says.

“We’ve had some students who have been given a mentor and a past student mentor, and after the first session, they realise they had the wrong idea about what they wanted to study.”

Leading by example

It’s very powerful for the students see a woman who went to the same school and wore the same uniform and had the same sort of experiences as them go on to perform at a high level in their chosen field or be on their way to performing on a high level, says Curtis.

At Monash University, student engagement and employability manager at the faculty of information technology Catherine Karavias also sees benefit in connecting students with professions in industry.

The university runs mentoring for men and woman, along with a specific Women in Technology Mentoring program.

“In a lot of the STEM faculties women are an under-represented group. For us, we felt we really wanted to move forward with our [Equity, Diversity and Inclusion] strategies and really just make a bespoke program, which is a woman-to-women program,” says Karavias.

The idea is to give women an edge before they enter the workforce by being connected with other women and understanding the challenges they might face in their chosen industry.

“Women in general maybe don’t see that they fit in a male-dominated field, and we’re really just trying to break that,” she says.

The 12-to-16 week program has continued to grow since it began in 2019, with past mentees wanting to become mentors to “pay it forward”, says Karavias.

“The common thing that comes out is confidence building and also ‘I never realised that that career path was achievable for me’. It helps them see what they have the potential to be.”