Cracking the Glass Ceiling Through Mentoring

1. Cracking the Glass Ceiling Through Mentoring Dr Caprice Lantz, Dr Bryan McIntosh

2. Aims • Explore the concept of the glass ceiling and its relevance today • Consider mentoring as a means to help women break through the glass ceiling • Suggest ways mentoring might be made more fit for purpose • Outline issues of relevance to the glass ceiling Centre for Inclusion and Diversity

3. Glass ceiling A metaphor to describe “a barrier so subtle that it is transparent, yet so strong that it prevents women and minorities from moving up the management hierarchy”. (HYMOWITZ & SCHELLHARDT, 1986)

4. Persistence of the glass ceiling • Persistent dearth of women in higher level positions. • Women account for just over 20% of members of the largest publically listed companies across the EU (European Commission, 2015). • Only 3.3% of top executive positions within these companies have woman CEOs. • Some countries have a particularly poor representation of women for example just 10% of senior ministers in Hungary are women (European Commission, 2013).

5. Is the glass ceiling outdated? Labyrinth – rather than the rigid barrier of the glass ceiling, some suggest “labyrinth” is more appropriate, symbolising the complex journey that women undertake to navigate a variety of barriers (Eagly and Carli, 2007a)

6. Is the glass ceiling outdated? Concrete ceiling (Hess-Biber & Carter, 2005) Glass escalator (Williams, 1992) Glass cliff (Ryan & Haslam, 2005) Glass slipper (Rudman & Heppen, 2003) Glass walls (Miller et al. 1999)

7. Mentoring Mentoring involves a relationship between two adults in which one (the mentor) helps the other (the protégé) to navigate the world (Kram,1985). Functions: • Provides career-related support to enhance advancement. Includes functions such as sponsorship, exposure, coaching, protection, and encouragement. • Provides psychosocial support helping protégés to develop competence, identity, and role effectiveness and includes functions such as role modelling, counselling, and friendship.

8. Does mentoring work? • Outcomes for mentoring can be objective (e.g., salary and promotion) or subjective (e.g., career satisfaction, job longevity). • Studies (e.g., Allen et al., 2004) generally find positive outcomes for mentored versus non-mentored individuals. • Receive more promotions, earn higher salaries, have more career satisfaction, less likely to leave their organizations.

9. Mentoring and Women • Historically mentoring studies focused on men. • More recently expanded to women and BME groups. • Mentoring through the glass ceiling focuses on objective benefits (e.g., level of position and salary). • 28% of companies in one survey offered mentoring programmes focused upon women and another survey found that women were actually more likely than men to have had a mentor at some point in their careers (Ibarra et al., 2010).

10. Does mentoring work for women? • Objective benefits borne out by research. • Female MBA graduates who had a mentor started their first jobs in higher level positions than those without. • They increased their chances of achieving mid-manager positions by 56% compared to women without. • Average starting salary was $661 (US) more than non-mentored women (Carter and Silva, 2010). However, data suggest that men benefit much more from mentoring relationships than women.

11. Benefits of mentoring for men compared to women • Men with mentors increased their chances of achieving mid-manager positions by 93% compared to 56% of mentored women. • Mentoring added significantly more to men’s salaries ($6,726 (US)) than to women’s salaries ($661 (US)).

12. Four main considerations in improving mentoring for women Goals and roles Formal and informal Men or women Mentor training

13. Relationship goals (e.g., settling in verses advancing?). Sponsorship versus mentoring • More women report having been mentored than men (83% cf. 76%) (Ibarra et al., 2010). • More men report having been sponsored than women (19% cf. 13%) (Hewlett et al, 2010). Why do men benefit more from mentoring? • Women’s mentors hold ‘less organizational clout’ than men’s mentors (Ibarra et al., 2010). Roles and Goals

14. Some research finds that those informally mentored receive significantly more compensation and promotions than those formally mentored (Ragins and Cotton, 1999). • Altruism versus tick box exercise • Mutual attraction versus natural rapport • Variation in ability to mentor • Protégé variability Formal versus Informal

15. Women as mentors: Some theory suggests women might make better mentors (e.g., social identity theory (Tajfel, 1974); similarity attraction paradigm (Byrne, 1971)). Men as mentors: • Research suggests men help women to gain higher level positions and salary (Ragins & Cotton, 1999). • Women view them as better sponsors due to their connections (Hewlett et al., 2010). • Challenges of cross-gender mentoring • Sexual tension may reduce effectiveness • Difficult for men to advice on women’s issues like double-bind • Female proteges may be viewed as not as career focused and given less strategic advice Men or Women?

16. Evaluation: Men v. Women as Mentors Women may provide more psycho-social benefits to female protégés but may not be strategically placed to facilitate advancement (Ibarra et al., 2010). May be other issues impacting female to female mentoring (e.g. Queen bee syndrome). Women are seen as less accessible to other women than men maybe having more home responsibilities (Hewlett et al., 2010). While men maybe better placed to mentor women through the glass ceiling, practice could be improved for both male and female mentors. Protégés could have both….

17. Senior executive = effective mentor? Mentor training

18. Mentoring can have an impact on women’s career progression and may help some to penetrate the glass ceiling. However focus on the glass ceiling may also divert attention away from other actions that might facilitate more effective change. Consider: • Gender bias (conscious or unconsicious) • Work life balance • Women’s responsibilities in the home (encourage more equality between men and women by encouraging men to make use of WLB. • Long hours culture (women ambivalent about becoming more senior with WLB being problematic in senior posts. Men may not like it either. • Glass ceiling focuses on objective career outcomes of salary and position while ignoring job satisfaction, work life balance, and well being. • Correlations between objective and subjective success tend to be low to moderate with none higher than .30 (Dette, 2004). Is mentoring most important?

19. Problem with mentoring through the glass ceiling • Mentors may help women to advance but if they do not want to make the necessary sacrifices to their personal lives they may continue to choose not to advance and continue to be underrepresented in top positions. Perhaps what’s needed is consideration of WLB for women’s career progression and men’s career satisfaction.

20. Innovative Mentoring • Top male executives • Paired with junior women • Goals: Advancing women’s careers and helping to raise mentors awareness of gender issues and to consider how policy, business strategy, and work-life issues might be addressed to create better work environments (Giscombe, 2007).

21. Conclusions Mentoring programmes are important but just part of a comprehensive approach within organisations to transform corporate culture to achieve both gender balance in leadership and work life balance for both women and men (Hewlett et al., 2010).

22. Thank you

23. References • ALLEN, T. D., EBY, L. T., PROTEET, M. L. & LENTZ, E. 2004. Career benefits associated with mentoring for protégés: a meta-analysis. Journal of Applied Psychology, 89, 127-136. • CARTER, N. M. & SILVA, C. 2010. Mentoring: necessary but insufficient for advancement. New York: Catalyst. • BYRNE, D. 1971. The Attraction Paradigm, New York, Academic Press. • EUROPEAN COMMISSION 2013. Women and men in leadership positions in the European Union. Luxembourg: Publications Office of the European Union. • EUROPEAN COMMISSION 2015. Gender balance on corporate boards: Europe is cracking the glass ceiling. Luxembourg: European Commission. • GISCOMBE, K. 2007. Advancing women through the glass ceiling. In: RAGINS, B. R. & KRAM, K. E. (eds.) The Handbook of Mentoring at Work: Theory, Research and Practice. Thousand Oaks: Sage Publishing Inc. • HYMOWITZ, C. & SCHELLHARDT, T. 1986. The glass ceiling. The Wall Street Journal. Special report on corporate women. • IBARRA, H., CARTER, N. M. & SILVA, C. 2010. Why men still get more promotions than women: your high-potential females need more than just well-meaning mentors. Harvard Business Review, 80-85. • KRAM, K. E. 1985. Mentoring at Work: Developmental Relationships in Organizational Life, Glenview IL, Scott Foresman.

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