Abstract
There has been much research on gender inequality in graduate education and the benefits of mentoring. However, most of this research focuses on how mentoring addresses female graduate students’ experiences of gender inequality instead of how the gender characteristics of departments impact the level of mentoring they offer. In particular, I examine how the gender composition of departments in terms of faculty and administration as well as faculty awareness of gender inequality or feminist issues influences the types of mentoring structures found in graduate departments of sociology. Bivariate correlations indicated that these characteristics (gender characteristics in particular) had significant relationships with mentoring structures in departments. This study concludes with a discussion of these relationships, an overview of policy implications, and suggestions for future research.
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Notes
For the purposes of this study, I define mentoring as a relationship when faculty members serve as advocates for graduate students by empowering them and helping them negotiate the unwritten rules of the system. This differs from advising where faculty members serve a more academic function by providing information about degree requirements to students (e.g. course information, registration, etc). This distinction is best understood by the following quote: “Advising is laying out the beaten path and setting someone to follow it. Mentoring is finding them in the bushes and showing them the range of paths out” (Schnaiberg 2005, p.31).
I chose to focus on departments of sociology because existing research typically examines mentoring across a range of disciplines. This makes it difficult to determine how findings relate to each discipline studied. For example, a survey of students in education and the social sciences may reveal that these departments lack mentoring structures. However, it is difficult to understand if this means that these departments lack mentoring structures overall or that certain departments lack these structures more than others. In essence, these characteristics shape the climate of the department. Department climate is subjective to some extent in that the individuals who are part of the department bring their personal lives to work. They bring all of their perceptions, attitudes, and experiences (in this case gender and feminist beliefs) with them to the department, which in turn shapes their attitudes towards the purpose of graduate education and faculty-student relationships.
I chose departments that offer a doctoral degree because research shows that doctoral students are more likely to be mentored (Johnson and Huwe 2003).
I selected the director of graduate studies to participate in the study because they are more familiar with the graduate program in their department. An important point to make is that this study relies on the way the director of graduate studies perceives departmental support of mentoring. Thus, one must interpret study findings with caution because one cannot assume that the perceptions of a single individual accurately reflect the mentoring culture/structures of departments.
Although mentoring has many dimensions that can be explored such as mentor-student matching, the use of power in mentoring relationships, mentoring style, etc., this study only focuses on “mentoring-friendliness, mentoring policies, peer-mentoring programs, and mentor support.
The 26 scale items are: faculty make recommendations to students, faculty give advice to students, faculty provide counsel to students, faculty promote the personal development of students, faculty try to stimulate students’ acquisition of knowledge, faculty provide information about educational programs, faculty try to help students understand educational bureaucracy, faculty serve as role models for students, faculty try to motivate students to perform at their potential, faculty provide emotional support to students, faculty encourage students, faculty try to help students build self-confidence, faulty try to improve students self-esteem, faculty train students into the profession, faculty sponsor students, faculty befriend students, faculty engage in joint research/publications with students, faculty nurture students, faculty socialize students into institutional culture, faculty socialize students into department culture, faculty inculcate professional values/ethics in students, faculty defend and protect students from others, faculty–graduate student relationships are characterized by mutual respect, faculty and graduate students are partners in the graduate experience, and faculty are interested in developing the graduate student as a whole person.
This was added as a substitute for number of gender or feminist courses that I was considering adding to the list of variables. I selected number of faculty that specializes in gender because often gender courses are not regularly offered. Thus, departments with faculty that specialize in gender may be more likely to introduce these concepts/values into their department and classrooms.
Specifically, this included all those faculty that listed “Gender”, “Feminist Theory”, “Sex and Gender”, “Inequality”, “Race/Class/Gender”, “Race, Class, and Gender”, “Gender Inequality”, “Gender and [blank]”, “Gender and [blank] Inequality”, “Feminist [blank]”, “Women/Men and [blank]”, in the 2003 American Sociological Association Guide to Graduate Departments.
The actual response rate was 41% (47 out of 116 surveys were returned). However, eight blank surveys were discarded and not included in the analysis.
Due to the small sample size, I accepted a p value of 0.10 and findings with this value are designated by a+ sign. The small sample size may have affected the power of the analysis, which in turn, may have been unable to detect other significant correlations between the variables studied. Furthermore, the significance of the correlations may have been stronger if certain variables could have been controlled for or if multivariate techniques were used.
One could argue that this correlation is spurious because one may believe that being designated “Gender-Friendly” by the SWS is predicated on the department having a peer mentoring program. However, it is important to note that this designation depends on 40% of faculty being female and over 25% of total faculty researching issues related to gender or inequality (Hays and Risman 2004).
See footnote 11.
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Acknowledgment
I would like to thank David Brunsma, Joan Hermsen, Norman Gysbers, Wayne Brekhus and Veronica Medina for their suggestions and comments.
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Dua, P. The Impact of Gender Characteristics on Mentoring in Graduate Departments of Sociology. Am Soc 39, 307–323 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12108-008-9053-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12108-008-9053-y