Mentoring is increasingly seen as valuable for the career progression of people, but getting the right mentor-mentee relationship is not always easy.  Often a range of factors are taken into account when looking for the right pairing, but new research from NYU Abu Dhabi reminds us that gender may also play a role.

The study highlights the value of good mentoring, with a high quality relationship linked to the scientific impact of researchers.  What was perhaps most interesting, however, is that a higher number of female mentors was not associated with gains for female mentees.

The researchers examined mentoring in scientific environments, with over 300 million published papers examined to explore the impact of mentoring on the output of mentees.  They looked at the career progression of scientists and were able to identify scientists that worked repeatedly together in a junior/senior collaboration.

“What makes this study of mentorship different to other previous studies is that we didn’t look at mentorship in the formal sense of a student and his or her advisor,” the researchers say. “Instead, we acknowledge that mentorship as a whole can come from multiple seniors throughout a junior scientist’s early career years, and a mentor does not necessarily have to take on a formal advisory role to fulfill such a role.”

Mentoring benefits

In total, the researchers identified around three million mentor-mentee pairs in their sample.  They then surveyed a random sample to confirm that they were actually in a mentor-mentee relationship.

From this, they were able to quantify the quality of the mentorship using two key metrics.  Firstly, they looked a “big-shot experience,” which quantifies how successful the mentor was during the period they were mentoring their protege.  This is gauged via the number of citations they secured during the mentorship period.

The second metric was referred to as “hub experience,” which measures the connection between the mentor and their peers by looking at the network of collaborators at both the start and the end of the mentoring process.

“While current diversity policies encourage same-gender mentorships to retain women in academia, our findings raise the possibility that opposite-gender mentorship may actually increase the impact of women who end up pursuing a scientific career,” the researchers conclude. “Our findings add a new perspective to the policy debate on how to best elevate the status of women in science.”