Mentorship Programs

I recently received an invitation from Wonderland U's mentorship program to be a faculty mentor for female medical students. The program's goal is to help students "understand the realities of being a woman in medicine, both in the hospital and at home". They pair students with female faculty who can "provide support and guidance that students cannot get through classes alone".

There's just one little problem: I'm not an MD and would be eminently unqualified to mentor medical students. You'd think they would check these details before sending the emails out!

Regardless, I think the program is a fantastic idea. It will help female students find role models and develop a support system. And it provides them with a network of people who are further down the path and can provide career advice. It certainly beats searching through the university's faculty directory to find someone to cold-call, which is what I've had to do.

So why doesn't Wonderland U have such a program for PhDs? This may be due in part to a difference in culture between medicine and science. In medicine, effort is made to retain and support those who have entered the training pipeline. Science, on the other hand, has more of a "sink or swim" mentality. And in my field, despite having equal numbers of male and female graduate students, most of those who emerge still swimming on the other side of the trainee-faculty divide are men.

And perhaps that is the problem--the representation of women drops so precipitously between the postdoctoral fellow and assistant professor stages that one would be hard-pressed to find enough female faculty to mentor the graduate students. This is not to say that female students can only be mentored by female faculty. I've been fortunate enough to have mentors who are men, but who have supported me and helped my career just as they've done for their male trainees. But it is still discouraging to look around the room at departmental seminars and see that all the senior faculty are men.

Years ago, when I was a student reporter for a university newspaper, we covered a symposium hosted by the university on gender issues. I was assigned to interview a female professor whose name and specific field of study I can no longer remember. But one thing she said during the interview has always stuck with me: that part of the reason progress on gender equality is so slow is because women who have made it do not always help those who come after them. And so each of us is left to blaze her own trail.

Perhaps women who have made it are still too busy competing with men to mentor younger women. Perhaps they feel younger women should have to pay their dues, just as they did. I don't really know what the solution is, but if we can find enough women faculty to participate, mentorship programs like the one for female medical students might not be a bad place to start.

Carnival of Feminists