Abstract
This paper aims at reviewing literature on mentoring in academia, with a focus on mentoring to enhance women’s careers. A significant gender imbalance in science persists, and mentoring has been recognized as an important instrument for fostering academic women’s careers and addressing such imbalance. However, often the benefits of mentoring are taken for granted. This review aims to unpack the concept of mentoring, understand which trends characterize the mentoring literature, and analyze the evidence; moreover, it aims to discover potential gaps and propose a model to guide future research. A systematic approach is undertaken: four relevant search engines, covering more disciplines, are browsed to look for empirical studies on mentoring academic women from 1990 to March 2017. The review shows that there are some problems. First, there is no agreement on the definition of mentoring. Then, often studies are poorly grounded from a theoretical and conceptual perspective. In addition to the dominating research stream, focused on the benefits for the mentee, three other streams are consolidating: impact on the mentors, the role of group mentoring, and mentoring as an instrument to change institutions. At the end, we propose a model to guide future studies built on a longitudinal perspective.
Original language | English |
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Pages (from-to) | 166-199 |
Number of pages | 23 |
Journal | Journal of Research in Gender Studies |
Volume | 7 |
Issue number | 1 |
Early online date | 15 May 2017 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - May 2017 |
Externally published | Yes |
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Profiles
-
Viviana Meschitti
- Department of Management - Senior Lecturer
- Huddersfield Business School
- Centre for Sustainability, Responsibility, Governance and Ethics - Member
Person: Academic