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Did you know that while 40 percent of higher education faculty and senior staff are female, only 21 percent of college and university presidents are women? Educational leadership roles such as president of the college are reserved for people with advanced educations and years of experience under their belts, and women can use mentors along the road.

New research just published in the Delta Kappa Gamma Bulletin surveyed 239 female administrators at higher education institutions in Tennessee. Only about two-thirds of these women had had a mentor at any time in their careers, which is a surprising finding because mentoring is considered an important part of most graduate schools.

Those who had mentors during their educations or professional careers had a lot of positive things to say about the mentoring relationship.

What Women Gain From Mentoring

As a woman aspires to being a leader, she must develop and practice leadership skills. There's a subtle art to effective leadership and having a guide is absolutely necessary. While it's possible to learn  leadership methods in school, watching it in action puts everything into perspective.

Mentors provide support and advice by listening and making suggestions. Sometimes all a woman needs is encouragement to take on more responsibility within her realm of influence, and other times she must make hard decisions that have a great impact on her school.

Mentors do more than act as a friend and role model. They create visibility within the work environment, find challenging assignments for the mentoring partner, and sometimes even offer her job promotions. This type of career development helps women advance to leadership roles within their institutions or helps them seek higher positions at other colleges and universities.

Find Mentors Early in Your Graduate Program

As you go through graduate school, take advantage of formal and informal mentoring relationships that develop. Though it's nice to have an exact match with a mentor of the same gender and ethnicity, it's more important to find mentors who can help you achieve your goals.

About half of the women in the survey had male mentors and half had female mentors. They didn't perceive any difference in the success of the mentoring relationship, however, which means that having a mentor is more important than having a female mentor specifically. This is good news for up-and-coming women who aspire to leadership roles at their universities, until there's a better balance between genders.

Reference

Dunbar, D.R. And Kinnersley, R.T. (2011). Mentoring female administrators toward leadership success. Delta Kappa Gamma Bulletin, 77(3), 17-24. Available from the Delta Kappa Gamma website.

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