Mentoring is one of the oldest career development interventions, likely emerging shortly after another ancient intervention, parenting! In modern times, mentorship has been championed in the business world and its effectiveness has been subjected to many empirical studies. We may think we know that mentoring works, but this study by Wu, Thiem, & Dasgupta (2022) asks whether the mentor’s sex makes a difference with female protégés and, if so, how lasting is the impact? They ask these questions because of their interest in the success of students typically underrepresented in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) programs, such as females.
Wu et al.’s study is longitudinal: that is, they check in on participants over time. Initially, they randomly assigned 150 female undergraduate students interested in engineering to one of three groups: female peer mentor, male peer mentor, and no mentor for their first year of college (it is a U.S. study). In an earlier study, they report on what happens in the first two years between these groups (in short, females with a female mentor benefitted academically compared to those with a male mentor or no mentor. They also did not suffer the losses associated with having a male mentor – higher anxiety, lower motivation, and lower belonging, confidence, and aspirations re: engineering); in this study, they compare the three groups right through to one year past graduation on:
- psychological experience in engineering
- postgraduate aspirations in engineering
- emotional well-being
- success in securing engineering internships
- retention in STEM majors through to graduation
The researchers predicted that female peer mentors would act as a “social vaccine” (a component of the Stereotype Inoculation Model), which would enable female students to better disregard negative stereotypes and maintain their interest and persistence in pursuing STEM. There was no expectation for male mentors to act as such as “vaccine” and, therefore, they anticipated that the group with female peer mentors would have more positive outcomes on all dimensions compared to the groups with male or no mentors. The statistical procedures they used are complex but support the statistical significance of the conclusions any of us would draw looking at the graph below. The very light thin line represents the students’ starting point re: confidence, motivation to continue with engineering, motivation to pursue graduate school in engineering, and well-being. Although change in each of these variables is different from the first year of post-secondary to one year past graduation, the made-up graph1 below illustrates that female students with female peer mentors improve or at least do not lose ground on these variables whereas female students with male mentors or no mentors do.
A key takeaway here is that some contexts, in this case engineering, send signals to some groups, such as females, that they are in the wrong place; they do not really belong. Having help from peer from one’s group (here, females) in that context makes it easier for a person to ignore or not be affected by those signals.
1In the interests of saving space, this composite graph was created simply to provide an overall visual of the results. The actual article includes detailed graphs that show the actual changes in scores.
Responses