What If We Took the Men Out of Mentorship?
some unedited musings on a woman's place in career readiness
Hey readers!
I’ve had a big update in my career - I now have shared custody of an intern with my work bestie. Admittedly, an intern is much more low stakes than being entrusted with a full-time employee with years of experience, but it’s got my brain turning in some new ways. I work in a largely male-dominated field, so I wasn’t surprised when all of our candidates were men, but I started to ideate on what unique value I can bring by mentoring a student intern from a woman’s perspective. Maybe I’ll be able to shield him from the bad habits of the boomer men in leadership, I thought. Peeling back the curtain on that thought made me realize that maybe it might be a bigger benefit than I could imagine.
I’m just thinking out loud here. These are my unedited and unfiltered thoughts in order from the stream of consciousness that brought them to me.
Before getting into the meat of this, I want to preface by saying that I am in no way commenting on the behavior or performance of my current intern. He has only been with us a short time, and any observations I make are generalized thoughts, assumptions, and things I philosophized in my own head about hypothetical interns.
Let’s Reframe This Thought
Back when I was dating, I had one major dealbreaker for men. Any man I date MUST have a good relationship with their mom and at least one sister. And I am not crazy for this. I think it is a common experience among women that men that didn’t grow up around women and girls or had a good relationship with any women in their lives are not going to show up to the relationship with the same skill and verve as men who did.
Can the same be said about male interns who have only ever worked for other men? Are they less desirable job candidates for positions overseen by women, even if it is just implicit?
I’ll reflect on this with an anecdote from an intern past. This guy was freshly 20 and having his first unpaid internship experience in the industry the summer before his sophomore year of college. He wasn’t a part of my team, but we crossed paths several times as interns often get passed around the organization.
We didn’t talk too much, but I swear every time I heard him open his mouth he was saying something insufferable. Trash talking projects he doesn’t like, saying that when he graduates, he won’t take an entry level job and just get into management. Things like that, things that only a man would say. It troubled me at first that he could get away with all of this. Why weren’t his managers intervening the same way my intern managers intervened when my awkward personality made me hard to work with early in my career? Duh, he learned this behavior from his managers. This is how his manager speaks. This was his manager’s career path. Something only a man could do.
Meanwhile, my woman manager during my internship put the pressure on me to be as effective and efficient as possible while also managing the social environment and my own reputation. For women, being stern and assertive usually makes you look like a B-word, while men succeed with that strategy. A successful working woman is more than a good worker, a successful working woman has mastery over optics and social awareness to be able to compete with men who have consistently been held to lower standards.
After this reflection I’m starting to realize that poor work behaviors - social ineptitude, being bad at email, skipping career steps because you’re “naturally more qualified” - are behaviors that are passed down through managerial lineages similar to behaviors and genetics passed down by a family and their parenting style. A 60-year-old man in the office today was most likely mentored at 20 by another 60-year-old man who was born in the 1910’s and experienced a corporate world BEFORE the large-scale integration of women and minorities in the workforce. Those same 60-year-old men are now mentoring our 20-year-olds on foundational assumptions that are no longer relevant to the social environment of the workplace.
I understand that the impacts of mentorship are highly situational, and no individual is purposely teaching their mentees harmful or biased behavior, but the reality of the situation is that the disparity between men and women in the workplace is a systemic problem and not something that individual action can impact en masse.
So my new thought is, what if we just went through one generation of young professionals that are exclusively mentored by members of the out-groups in their profession? Could that effectively stop perpetuating the double standards weaponized against women? Maybe it could help standardize the quality of work product between men and women in the organization?
…anyways
I don’t have much more to say on the subject. TL;DR girls rule, boys drool. Sorry that my industry has already hardened me enough at the ripe age of 25 to be fed up with men who underperform and weaponize incompetence in the workplace. I don’t think every man is like this, just a couple.
I have no recommendations, and it probably isn’t worth my time to pursue this further, but I’ll still ask my audience: Is this something you’ve experienced? Have you had any invaluable experiences with women mentors? Do you have any ideas of how I can play my small part with my current intern to help him perform to his highest potential? let me know in the comments!
About Quintessential
Thank you so much for reading! Quintessential is a collection of personal writings about how I am managing to live my life authentically as myself. You may be interested in this publication if you:
Are a young woman trying to make it in this world;
Enjoy niche topics;
Care about your communities around you;
Don’t take life too seriously; and
Want to know what makes me, me!
I want to see your work family tree in a future post 👀