How Mentoring can help to #BreakTheBias
International Women's Day earlier this month enabled a lot of discussion around how women's voices can be heard. With a theme of #BreakTheBias we looked at how to bring more gender equality into the workplace.
How can mentoring schemes be a force for good when it comes to overcoming gender bias?
As well as opening the doors to opportunities and boosting confidence a well designed mentoring scheme can also cultivate insightful conversations around the real life issues and challenges faced by women in the workplace. They offer a compelling opportunity to explore and surface biases in what is often still male-dominated work environments.
Given the dearth of women at senior levels in business, for example, could more extensive use of mentoring help women to climb the career ladder but also open the eyes of business leaders/managers to the challenges that women face in the day to day working lives?
The challenges women face in the workplace are well-documented and we need to move beyond just opening eyes and also incorporate intersectionality, equity and systemic transformation.
The way forward has to explore the next generation approaches to Mentoring. One such approach is Reciprocal Mentoring. Here the mentoring pairs have equal power in the relationship and are partners in both the learning experience and inclusive transformation. Supportive of each other, working towards a shared understanding and informed decision making. This approach leads to a focus on individual and wider systemic transformation.
For more on how we can take action on gender inequality and bias in the workplace I sat down with my publisher Kogan Page.