Mentors who pass down their experience, may also be passing down their own biases and the biases that existed in the workplace earlier in their career.

Empower yourself

When this happens, you may not be getting the mentoring you deserve. And you may have to do some gentle education to help your mentor understand your unique challenges.

This is true for female as well as male mentors. Women who came to their careers thirty, even fifteen years ago, hadn't experienced #metoo cultural changes and many did not have female mentors themselves. Their experience at your career stage was different. You can benefit from what they've learned and experienced, but they may not have been as empowered as you are now.

Men, of course, have not experienced life as a woman and are often unaware of the challenges you face that have never been relevant to their own career development.

Get the data - don't let your mentor tell you (or imply) that "it's all in your head"

It's human nature for someone who doesn't see something you do to tell you you're not seeing things correctly. And natural unconscious bias means we all filter out a lot of information that we simply don't see. When you run into challenges helping your mentor understand your unique perspective, especially that informed by your femininity, turn to the resources in this program to help you find the data to help them see what you're experiencing. The topics and resources in this program include data you can share with your mentor on:

  • common workplace biases and discriminations against women

  • double-standards of leadership behavior between women and men

  • financial, workload and expectation inequities 


Don't get me wrong, your mentors' experiences that are different than yours are valuable by themselves. However you have the right to educate them about your experience and ask for their advice through your own lens instead of only through theirs. 

Empower yourself with research about challenges you experience as a woman and learn to ask your mentor for the best advice they can give to help you.