Mentoring women students in engineering: Lessons learned from the sociology of gender

Abstract

Women in engineering who seek mentoring relationships face a number of special challenges and obstacles. Interpersonally- and institutionally-generated gender dynamics make the construction and maintenance of mentoring relationships especially difficult. Mentoring of both female and male students can be enhanced by recognizing the different cultural styles of women and men, the needs of women (and many men) for supportive and nurturing relationships in the midst of a highly competitive educational system. Mentoring strategies that fit more readily with a female cultural worldview, according to well-accepted theories on the sociology of gender, are peer-, multiple- and collective mentorships. Mentoring of women must also acknowledge the socially-constructed dynamics of gender that affect cross-gender relationships and respond to the special ways in which women must often balance career and family relationships. Successful mentoring of women rests on, and can help create, a caring community in which women (and men) have equal access to all educational resources including those relevant to their psychosocial as well as technical growth and success.