 Challenging the gendered rhetoric of success? The limitations of women‐only mentoring for tackling gender inequality in the workplaceKatherine Dashper Gender, Work and Organization, 2019, vol. 26, issue 4, 541-557 Abstract: Mentoring is widely acknowledged to be an important contributor to women's career success and progression, but women often struggle to access mentoring networks that can help sponsor and develop their careers. Formal mentoring programmes designed specifically for women help overcome this challenge, but such schemes may at the same time reinforce masculine discourses which position women as deficient in relation to the invisibly male norm that is implicit within contemporary working practices. Drawing on a formal women‐only mentoring programme built on gender‐positive goals to empower women to ‘be the best they can be’ within the events industry, this article considers the extent to which such programmes can both challenge and reproduce gendered discourses of business and success. Interviews with mentors and mentees illustrate how such programmes make gender visible within business and individual careers, but masculinist underpinnings of organizational discourses remain invisible, unacknowledged and thus largely unchallenged. Date: 2019 Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bla:gender:v:26:y:2019:i:4:p:541-557 Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from Access Statistics for this article Gender, Work and Organization is currently edited by David Knights, Deborah Kerfoot and Ida Sabelis More articles in Gender, Work and Organization from Wiley Blackwell |
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