Just Say No to Women's Mentoring Programs. Here's what to do instead.

If you are a CEO dedicated to equality in the workplace, does your company have a women’s mentoring program? Or perhaps you are an HR professional thinking of setting up a mentoring program for women? This post might be a bit controversial, but hopefully it will provide a bit of a counterpoint to one of the popular tactics to address the distressing gap in the rates of promotion between men and women , despite women being better educated than men for over 20 years .?

Many companies have set up special women’s mentoring programs for high-potential, high-performing women to help them get their next promotion. Most of these companies do this because they notice that the rate of male promotions exceeds that of women being promoted (which is a fairly universal problem, according to McKinsey’s Women in the Workplace studies), and they have a dearth of women in the top ranks. This leads to a well-meaning realization that they need to find ways to promote more women. A mentoring program aimed at the women being denied promotions, however, is precisely the wrong way to go about this.?

Let’s think about the implications of a women’s mentoring program to help women get promoted, and what it actually serves to do in an organization.

Do you notice in your company that:

1. High-performing women often need to be mentored in order to change something about themselves in order to get promoted, like their communication style or how collaborative their colleagues perceive them to be?
2. Women have to jump through an additional hoop of completing a mentoring program to get promoted, holding them back from promotion until they have completed the program, whereas men get promoted without having to complete that additional step?
3. Busy professional women need to find extra time in their day for a mentoring program to fix or change themselves in order to qualify for the next promotion, whereas men can spend all their time on doing their actual job?
4. Women need to have a mentoring program to introduce them to the top executives in the company to get promoted, while top executives seem to know more names of men without a special program?

Indeed, women’s mentoring programs usually only exacerbate the problems they are meant to fix. They communicate that highly competent women need to “fix” or “change” something about themselves before they can become leaders whereas the males are “born ready” for leadership (A). They slow down the rate of promotion for women (B). They create more work for women and take time out of women’s days to focus on producing business results (C). They make it ok to not give women credit for their work because the mentoring program becomes a substitute for day-to-day credit and recognition (D).?

So what should a well-meaning HR leader or CEO do? A better solution would be a mentoring program for executives to help them address why they are not promoting women at the same rates as men, and mentor the people making promotion decisions to turn this around. In other words, the people who need mentoring at a company where women are not being promoted are not the women, but the people who are in charge of the promotions. This is also not at all hard to do: look at the rates of male and female promotions under every C-suite and VP leader, and for those departments that have a disparity of promoting women vs men, assign those leaders mentors and coaches that will help them assess why this is happening and help resolve it.?

TLDR, if your company is thinking of setting up a special mentoring program for women to address a gender disparity issue, just say no. What these programs likely communicate is: “At our company, women need mentoring to get promoted, but men get promoted on their merits without having to change themselves.” Instead, promote men and women based on the same standards – and you will know you have succeeded if men and women rise through the ranks at the same rates and speed. If not, I’d suggest that the people who need mentoring are your executives making promotion decisions, not the women who are being denied promotions.