Who Supports Senior Women? The Role of Mentors

Abstract

The relationship between women’s career progression and mentoring is well established. Mentors are often perceived as being linked to promotion opportunities (Durbin and Tomlinson, 2014; Groysberg, 2008; Vinnicombe and Singh, 2002) and to offer ‘reflected power’ to mentees (Kanter, 1977) usually through the mentor’s established networks. While mentoring relationships are a well-explored topic in the literature, a comparison of mentoring split between the public and private sectors is absent.