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Mentoring is an important process in executive development, which facilitates more rapid career progress. Nearly two‐thirds of executives have had a mentor at some stage. Women are more often excluded from mentoring relationships. Describes the mentoring of female executives and discusses the associated issues: whether the gender of the mentor matters to the success of the mentoring process; whether having a mentor is necessary for the success of female managers; and the drawbacks/ barriers to mentoring.

Men have power in organizations that women often lack. Investigates generally men′s and women′s employment, job segregation, and part‐time employment. Discusses the barriers to women′s progress. The first barrier is the role women have been socialized to adopt, for example, passive. The second is lack of support including limited financial resources, education and training, lack of child care arrangements, networks, role models, mentors and domestic constraints. A third barrier is attitudes such as employer biases, negative perceptions of women, attribution of female behaviour and use of language. Suggests how women could gain more power. Positive action is required within schools to encourage girls to pursue non‐traditional career plans. Further awareness of the problems arising from sex stereotyping is needed. Through mentoring women could have access to the power network. However, peer mentoring can be an egalitarian alternative for women. Discusses the importance of assertiveness training for women.

This is the title of an article by Valerie Fawcett in Volume 15 Number 3 of Library Management. This programme has been helping many women in library and information work to fulfil their potential. Women who have taken part in this personal development course have become more confident and assertive, and their managers have found them more willing to put forward their ideas, take the initiative, and take on additional responsibilities. Many achieve promotion, but women set their own agenda on the course, decide what they want to achieve and the steps they need to take.

The recent years have been marked by the increasing participation of women in the labour force internationally. Especially in the industrialised countries of Western Europe and North America, this labour force participation is now well over 40%. Globally, however, the estimate is around 33%. A large number of these women are still found in the agriculture sector and the informal sector of industry. For those working in the formal industrial sector, a significant portion work in the shopfloor of assembly line operations for products ranging from electronics to textiles. Women in management comprise less than 1% of all economically active women. For the purposes of this paper, a “manager” is defined as a person who has latitude in decision making as to the allocation and use of organisational resources, including physical, financial, and human resources.

Interprofessional collaboration (IPC) is increasingly important in work and workplace learning. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the characteristics of IPC that are relevant for learning and developing at work.

We examine IPC in the discussion data of health care professionals when designing, implementing and evaluating developmental tasks. Qualitative content analysis is carried out on temporally sequential task trajectories, considering IPC from the perspective of the objects and goals of IPC task activity in developmental efforts.

The developmentally relevant characteristics of IPC are crystallized in the concepts of coordination, co-creation and community building, which play different, interdependent roles in development efforts. We show their interplay and how they complement each other in practice.

Our findings regarding IPC characteristics are to be interpreted as working hypotheses and resources for further research.

Understanding the dynamics of IPC is useful for renewing work practices. Attention to the interplay and complementarity of IPC characteristics may help in the design and implementation of effective and sustained development efforts.

The dynamics of IPC in developmental settings have not been sufficiently studied. This paper proposes three developmentally relevant and intertwined characteristics of IPC for scholars of workplace learning.