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The alta mentoring platform, launched within the aviation and aerospace industry in 2019, is the outcome of a joint knowledge exchange project between academics and industry. It was designed and launched to meet the mentoring needs of women in this male dominated industry, who otherwise had no, or very little, mentoring support. The aim of alta was to create an on-line mentoring platform that was based upon the mentoring support that women identified as being important and that would address their under-representation and the lack of support for career progression. The chapter draws upon a body of literature focussing upon mentoring, specifically its meanings (see Dashper, 2018), benefits (see Phillips et al., 2016) and barriers (see Eby et al., 2010); as well as gender specific mentoring (see Johns & McNamara, 2014). The authors adopt a feminist relational mentoring framework (Ragins, 2016), that views mentoring as a two-way process where mentors and mentees learn from each other. The project was under-pinned by six months of research across the industry (a survey, interviews and focus groups with professional women and employers) to ascertain the need for the mentoring platform. This chapter is based upon four focus groups held with women across the industry, in both technical and middle/senior managerial roles, to ascertain their experiences of mentoring and their perceived and experienced benefits and barriers to mentoring. The focus groups were also utilised to find out specifically what women wanted from the alta mentoring platform and their views on its women-only focus.

This study explored the motives, relationship dynamics and outcomes of male executives in mentoring Black African women within the context of South Africa. The authors investigated the experiences of White, Black African, coloured, and Indian male mentors conducting cross-gender and cross-race mentoring in South Africa.

A qualitative study was conducted with 21 male executives within South Africa's male-dominated financial services industry. Data were collected via semi-structured, one-on-one virtual video interviews. The study endeavoured to deeper understand the mentors' experiences during their interactions with the intersecting marginalised identities of Black African women as protégés.

The authors found that the mentoring relationship is central to mentoring Black African women. This relationship is often influenced by the mentors' parental approach to mentoring, with resultant negative consequences, including the protégé not taking accountability for driving the relationship. Mentors' stereotypical expectations of women as homemakers and carers also influenced mentoring experiences. Mentors' motives included growing next generation leaders, which led to mentors' job satisfaction.

This study contributes an account of male executives' motivations for mentoring Black African women, the relationship dynamics as well as negative mentoring experiences, and the mentoring outcomes for protégés and mentors. Intersectionality theory was used to highlight the mentors' lack of insight into the intersecting marginalised identities of Black African women in the unique South African context, where inequalities in terms of class, race, and gender are amplified.

The present paper aims at discussing the transformative potential of an e‐mentoring support with regard to mentors' and mentees' learning and behavioral aspects, through an empirical study based on rural women entrepreneurs in Greece.

Mentors' and mentees' perceptions with regard to the benefits they acquired in terms of knowledge, skills and behavioral aspects were assessed through questionnaires that were collected in three time periods – before, right after and six months upon the completion of the intervention.

E‐mentoring can serve as a dynamic, two‐fold relationship that can create a significant learning database benefiting both sides. Mentees' knowledge and skills were positively influenced, while their attitudes facing uncertainty, flexibility and innovation were found to be strongly influenced in the short and long run. Mentors did not seem to acquire extraordinary benefits from e‐mentoring in terms of knowledge and skills, while their attitudes towards flexibility and interest in people demonstrate a marginally negative tendency. Both mentors' and mentees' self‐confidence demonstrated an increased tendency and was influenced throughout the intervention and six months upon its completion.

Besides benefiting the direct e‐mentoring participants and enhancing the development of women entrepreneurship, findings can also significantly benefit management and policy‐makers alike, creating avenues to further advance future efforts and practices in raising tomorrow's women entrepreneurs.

Theoretical and empirical evidence in the field of e‐mentoring as well as on encouraging future women entrepreneurs remains scarce. The present paper constitutes a first step towards suggesting an approach to e‐mentoring practices, raising awareness and faith with regard to the beneficial role that e‐mentoring support can have in the development of women entrepreneurship.

The purpose of this paper is to provide a discussion of some salient research relating to mentoring for women managers.

The paper draws mainly upon writing and research from the UK, USA, Canada and Australia to explore some of the issues that continue to be pertinent for the mentoring of women managers.

The paper explores some of the early arguments promoting mentoring for women in the light of more recent research. From the literature, three key issues that have important implications for women in mentoring relationships are considered. These are identifying the nature and focus of mentoring relationships; managing cross‐gender mentoring and negotiating the power dimension that underpins the mentoring relationship.

The paper provides a discussion of the practical implications of three key issues that are significant for women managers.

The paper draws together work in the field and distils a number of issues and their implications that require further attention and discussion.

The purpose of this paper is to advance the argument for the transformative potential of e‐mentoring support to women entrepreneurs, presenting an e‐mentoring intervention to rural women entrepreneurs in Greece.

A six stage e‐mentoring process is practiced through a project supporting rural women entrepreneurs, based on mentees' and mentors' reactions. Their expressed degree of satisfaction with regard to the e‐mentoring relationship, achievement of personal goals, as well as their desire to continue the relationship are served as useful indicators. Questionnaires are used during three times (pre and post the e‐mentoring relationship, i.e. before, just after its end and six months later) to obtain information from mentees' and mentors' groups.

The features of the quality of the e‐mentoring relationship such as mentors'/mentees' characteristics, frequency of contacts, and e‐services are judged to be satisfactory by both mentors and mentees. Mentees perceive that they sufficiently achieved their personal goals, emphasizing the successful role modeling that their mentors provide. Mentors gain publicity and the broadening of their connections.

The survey results could offer substantial assistance to decision makers concerning designing and implementing e‐mentoring processes supporting female entrepreneurship.

Despite the explosion of online mentoring opportunities, few academic articles and little empirical evidence have addressed e‐mentoring support to women entrepreneurs. The present paper attempts to add research results and suggests a framework of e‐mentoring process discussing both mentors' and mentees' reactions.

Mentoring relationships have been proposed as a potential intervention to alleviate gender disparities in scholarly output. Yet, previous research has not provided a systematic understanding of the relationship between mentoring and scholarly output. The authors propose that individuals with a proactive personality are especially suited to leverage mentoring relationships to enhance scholarly outcomes. Structural features of mentoring relationships – gender composition, mentor supervisory status, and mentoring relationship length – provide cues that encourage the expression of proactive personality and result in higher scholarly impact.

Data were collected via surveys from faculty members in a US university and were matched with objective scholarly impact data. Hierarchical multiple regression analyses were used for hypothesis testing.

The impact of proactive personality on scholarly impact was more positive for women protégés with women mentors than for all other mentor-protégé pairings. Results also showed support for two hypothesized three-way interactions with mentor status and mentoring relationship length.

This research provides insights into the contexts where mentorship makes the most difference in protégés' scholarly achievement. Gender composition of mentoring dyads and mentor status are important boundary conditions that impact the effect of proactive personality on scholarly output.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the ways in which an innovative higher education women’s faculty mentoring community model fosters supportive networking and career-life balance. The secondary goal is to better understand the factors that both promote and limit retention of women faculty at a large, metropolitan university.

The paper examines data from the survey component of an applied research project on understanding and supporting the complex processes of women faculty’s pathways toward self-defined success. Adopting a mixed method research approach, this manuscript focuses on the survey questions related to four key issues related to retention: mentor experiences, gender-based obstacles, a sense of support and community, and goal attainment. In addition to quantitatively examining shifts in perceptions between pre- and post-survey Likert scale questions, the authors performed a qualitative analysis of the supplemental open-ended questions, utilizing a social constructionist lens to further understand perceived influences of the mentoring community on these issues.

The findings revealed qualitatively important shifts in increased awareness surrounding mentoring, gender-based obstacles, interpersonal support, and career-life choices, offering critical insight into the intangible, and thus often difficult to capture, forms of support a mentoring community model can offer women faculty. Findings also reveal how definitions of success can be integrated into community mentoring models to support retention and empowering women faculty.

This study is limited by its exploratory nature with one mentoring community cohort. Ongoing implementations are in place to increase the participant size and further test the mentoring model, while future research is encouraged to implement and expand the research to additional higher education institutions.

This research offers a model that can be implemented across higher education institutions for all faculty, along with offering insight into particular points that can be emphasized to increase perceptions of support, offering concrete mentoring options.

This paper contributes to the advancement of mentoring models, helping to address concerns for better supporting and advancing women faculty, with implications for further supporting marginalized faculty. It offers insight into the ways in which a mentoring model can help to address key issues of retention. Additionally, analyzing quantitative and qualitative findings concurrently allowed for insight into areas that may otherwise be overlooked due to seemingly contradictory or non-significant statistical findings.

The importance of mentoring and networking for women in management and administration has been identified in recent articles in Women in Management Review. Contributes to the growing body of literature in this area by examining some of the different sources of mentoring and kinds of networks available to women educators who are aspiring to higher educational administration posts in Australian Government schools. Argues that it is much easier for male teachers and male educational administrators to access power through mentoring and networking than it is for female teachers and female educational administrators because mentoring and networking have both been traditionally male dominated practices.

The purpose of this study was to examine whether middle-level female administrators (particularly women of color) in the California Community College system were being mentored to higher-level positions and whether the retention of leaders in higher-level positions was influenced by mentoring. Specifically, this study examined the mobility and retention of female administrators through a web-based survey that was completed by 156 females currently working in administrative positions at the dean's level or higher in California Community Colleges. Data were also collected through face-to-face interviews with 11 female administrators, 5 of whom were women of color, in senior-level positions from vice president to chancellor. These interviews reflected a range of demographics and were located in Northern, Central, and Southern California. The focus of this chapter is on the responses of the respondents who were women of color.

The study addressed two questions: (1) What effect did mentoring, if any, have on a person's ability to achieve higher-level leadership positions? and (2) What relationship does mentorship have on the retention of women of color in leadership? Findings reported that mentoring was having a positive and often significant influence on women of color administrators and leaders in the California Community College System.

This chapter investigates the role of gender, mentoring and social capital and contributes to literature about the career development of women in senior management roles in the National Health Service of the UK. It draws on a doctoral study of senior-level managers in a Scottish NHS Board. The data collected are: (i) documentary; (ii) quantitative; and (iii) qualitative. The quantitative data are collected through questionnaires, while the source of qualitative data is in-depth semi-structured interviews. The doctoral study is embedded within an interpretivist and feminist paradigm. Although access to mentoring and social capital was seen as likely to enhance the career progression of females to senior managerial roles, gendered work and family expectations, gendered organisational culture, and normative performances of gendered senior management were identified as obstacles in taking advantages of mentoring and social capital. To the best of our knowledge, this is the only piece of work that explicitly investigates the role of mentoring and social capital in managing gender diversity at the senior managerial positions of the NHS.