Women in Tech – Advent of Mentoring

A TrustRadius report cites that 72% of surveyed women in tech are routinely outnumbered by men at business meetings with a 2:1 or greater, while an additional 26% reported being outnumbered at 5:1 or more. 

No wonder even though women in tech have achieved phenomenal growth and continually blaze trails, they remain underrepresented.

Numerous people yearn to evoke transformation within the existing framework. One such name is Suw Charman-Anderson who launched Ada Lovelace Day in 2009 and wanted to raise awareness of women’s success. Interestingly enough, Ada is titled as the world’s first computer programmer owing to her extraordinary mathematical skills and fascination with machines.

Musing what she did so special? Elaborately put, she established Ada Lovelace Day intending to make women in tech more visible and celebrated. Her ambition was to invigorate people to fervently celebrate the accomplishments of women and the causes they stood up for. Plus, to create inspiring new role models for the younger generation of women.

This initiative was motivated by Penelope Lockwood’s research demonstrating that women ought to have more inspiring role models than men.

And this is where WIT mentoring can play a catalyst role in aiding women to sharpen their abilities, bolster assurance, create connections, and further progress within their professions. 

Providing mentorship can create a favorable trajectory toward achieving gender equality by furnishing women with similar opportunities for experience, engagement, and prospects (usually extended to men). This way the disparity between genders can be productively bridged.

For instance, mentoring can help women to decide which form of training would help them progress in their career path, such as workshops on coding. It can also be used to pitch a career-oriented idea or provide relevant practical experiences tailored to the individual’s interests. Above all, mentors can serve as much-needed role models, opening doors to potential job openings, internships, sponsorships, and collaborative work partnerships.

Also Read: Mentoring In The Workplace: Importance & Benefits

How mentoring can help overcome such challenges?

The hardships encountered by females in the technological realm are manifold and multifarious. Let’s find out how mentoring acts as a solution:

Gender Bias in the Workplace

Oftentimes, women are met with prejudicial treatment on account of their gender–stifling any advancement prospects and, consequently burdening them with a much heavier workload.

This unequal distribution of work leaves many feeling discouraged and frustrated. To palliate these prejudices and provide women with more chances to succeed, mentoring can be utilized as a potent instrument.

Specifically, experienced professionals can impart their knowledge to novices or those confronting hardship in the tech arena. These can help them feel empowered in their workplace, aiding in both professional development and personal life.

Extending on this, mentors can turn into invaluable assets in helping to traverse the corporate landscape, combat biased protocols, and bring harmony between one’s personal objectives and career aspirations. Thus, they can serve as shining exemplars and champions for other aspiring female tech professionals.

Discriminatory Policies

Mentorship helps reduce biases in hiring policies that frequently leave qualified women ignored. It can help utilize their influence to recommend budding female talents for job openings or provide guidance for resume writing. 

Furthermore, mentors can facilitate the creation of more inclusive networks of both male and female professionals committed to each other’s growth and achievements–supporting diversity. By connecting people across departments and nurturing meaningful relationships, mentoring contributes to the dismantling of traditional hierarchies in which gender disparities remain pervasive. 

Instilling Confidence

WIT Mentoring can be an unparalleled asset for women’s professional growth and for cultivating self-assurance. This is because it offers accessibility to mentors’ resources and advice; thereby, allowing women to become more independent and competent–qualities required for commanding leadership positions; ignoring negative feedback or stereotypes. 

Importantly, mentors will remain steadfast in extending emotional support, generating faith, spurring new ambitions, and inspiring women to take chances even when gender-based obstacles stand in their way. Thus, having someone trustworthy, backing them during difficult times is priceless–it provides an unwavering sense of security.

How to tackle prevailing problems in the tech industry? 

Mentoring has become increasingly essential in helping women to excel within the technology sector. There are numerous mentoring options, mentioned below, available to women in tech who can help them in their careers.

One-on-One Mentoring

This involves matching mentors with mentees to facilitate the exchange of their perceptions, wisdom, and techniques to deal with problems in a chosen field.

Mentors should be acquainted, experienced, and ready with the right skills to provide useful advice and aid to their mentees so that women can master intricate technical matters or advance their careers. 

Many top-notch companies like Google are into mentoring initiatives–supporting women’s economic potential. By participating in such individualized mentoring sessions, women can comprehend their professional aspirations more thoroughly. Moreover, women can hone their technological aptitudes, strengthen their confidence, and associate with kindred spirits.

Mentors can focus on domains like developing leadership or smart communication skills, networking capabilities, or refining existing knowledge. A paradigm instance of this could be a mentoring program, wherein female professionals acquire tailored guidance from accomplished mentors on coping with occupational stressors in the work environment.

Buddy Mentoring Programs

A buddy program facilitates a congenial atmosphere for recruits; especially women. It would provide them with invaluable intelligence accrued from their peers’ prior learning expeditions. Importantly, a buddy program allows experienced female professionals and their protégée to collaborate on several projects together, exchange vital knowledge, and lend needed support. Not surprisingly, 69% of women prefer mentors of the same gender.

For instance, the buddies will be matched with similar interests or goals to work on a pilot project or refine existing IT projects. This collaboration often turns into a long-term bonding, each seeking invaluable insight from the other.

Peer-to-Peer Mentoring Programs

Peer mentoring is a growing practice, where protégées can engage with counterparts of similar standing for technical guidance and conversation. This paves the way for novel connections to be forged as well as new avenues for teamwork to arise–wherein women can outshine men.

An outstanding illustration of such a practice would be a WIT mentoring initiative that links aspiring technologists with their like-minded superiors to brainstorm concepts for overcoming technical obstacles collaboratively.

Also, peer mentors are proficient in furnishing mentorship across a broad scope of topics. This would be ardent work engagement to prompting critical thinking to problem-resolving techniques to gaining expertise on the subject matter.

Group Mentoring

Group mentorship is a sleek option for those seeking assistance in collective wisdom rather than one-to-one meeting. Groups typically meet weekly to discuss topics related to success in the field, such as personal branding and negotiation techniques. 

Examples include group mentoring programs, focussed on minority groups discussing their problems in the workplace. Else, it would be a mentoring group discussion that connects participants with senior executives across the company to foster networking connections and career growth.

Benefits of WIT Mentoring

Women have historically been marginalized in multiple disciplines, and WIT mentorship programs stand to galvanize female engagement professionally. Let’s take a closer look at how mentoring can assist women to fast-track their career paths.

• WIT Mentoring is an exceptional scheme for rectifying gender disparity, resulting in augmented job contentment, improved vocational prospects, and ultimately a more balanced workspace.

• Mentoring women in technology is advantageous due to its potential to supply pathways into superior roles within their discipline. 

• Mentors can create opportunities for those they are mentoring by introducing them to eminent figures, broadening their emotional and intellectual horizons, or imparting directions to upskill their existing technical skills through certification courses or micro-credentials. 

• Mentors serve as a link between junior and senior employees and avoid ego clashes between them. 

• They can also assess how well-versed newbies are and their reasoning capabilities, and especially, their ability to respond under different workplace scenarios. 

• WIT mentoring can create improved morale; foster diversity and ultimately, drive innovation, making it an invaluable source of professional development.

• WIT mentoring provides a platform wherein women can meaningfully participate, bolstering their self-assurance and garnering esteem from colleagues and employers.

Conclusion

Mentoring female technologists is an immensely rewarding undertaking, endowing women with precious knowledge and resources otherwise unavailable to them.

Furthermore, it bestows female entrepreneurs the opportunity to benefit from sound guidance when tackling the obstacles of the industry while in the meanwhile forming a much-needed support system.

Mentoring Complete is a platform that can enhance WIT mentoring exercise, as women can share their thoughts anytime, anywhere confidentially–without worrying about who will say what. A Precision Matching tool, specially designed to help organizations build compatible mentoring matches, can help mentoring relationships last. 

So take action now and join the movement of empowering female technologists!

Want to make your workplace mentoring programs successful? We’re happy to help you!