Mentoring and its Role in Women's Career: A Critical Perspective

Organizations globally are making efforts to value gender diversity in management and are longing to achieve diversity in their workplaces. However the major concentration of attempts has been on the broad issues of diversity rather than development of women leaders. Most organizations lack well defined strategies for developing their women workforce and their leadership roles. Although hiring has been at an equal rate for both the genders, glass ceiling has often been a challenge for mid level career among women.

A recent study of SHRM (2009) revealed inadequate mentoring as one of the major hurdles in developing women in leadership roles. Though cross-gender mentoring is well accepted it is rather complex and has several limitations. Despite an increase in the women workforce the number of women mentors in the Indian context is discouragingly low. Also as pointed out by Ragins (1994) the few available female mentors are overburdened with mentoring requests from women in the lower levels (Hunt& Michael, 1983). This conceptual paper aims to investigate the status of mentoring today and its role in the career of women leaders through a comprehensive literature survey.

The paper critically reviews and outlines different barriers of cross- gender mentoring in the corporate set up. It further argues of the usefulness of "women mentoring women leaders", especially in the Indian business context which is still largely male dominated. The author has proposed a foundation for further empirical studies on how these barriers of male mentors and female proteges can be effectively reduced by "women mentoring women" in Indian organizations.