Exploring Women Engineering Faculty’s Mentoring Networks

Abstract

Research on mentoring has expanded from examination of traditional mentor-protege dyads to developmental mentoring networks. 20,37 In these network approaches, the emphasis is on a constellation of career developmental and personally supportive relationships to design career experiences for focal individuals and to respond to the issues that these focal individuals, or mentees, express. 1,15 To study engineering women faculty’ career experiences, we examine their egocentric mentoring networks, 29 that is, the individuals’ self-reported linkages between themselves (i.e., “ego” or hub of the network) and career developmental “nodes”/mentors. We use a mixed methodological approach including multi-dimensional network analysis to map out the configurations of women faculty’s mentoring network 11 and inductive analysis 6,7 to code our interview transcripts for mentoring relationships, women faculty’s feelings about such relationships, and their perceived outcomes. Female engineering faculty members generally express dissatisfaction with the formal mentoring programs but endorse their informal and spontaneous/episodic mentorships emerging from their egocentric mentoring network. These women’s mentoring networks are highly career-driven and consist of heterogeneous/diverse nodes, as well as multiplex ties that indicate multiple relationships between mentors and mentees. We provide theoretical and pragmatic implications of mentoring networks in the context of engineering faculty development. Mentoring is a dynamic process that is defined as “a communication relationship in which a senior person supports, tutors, guides, and facilitates a junior person’s career development” (p. 15). 23 It is traditionally characterized by reciprocity or mutuality of social exchange, developmental benefits linked to the mentees’ work and career, and consistent mentor-mentee interactions over some period of time 20 as opposed to a one-way short-term relationship. Research on mentoring has expanded from examination of traditional mentor-protege dyads to diverse situationally-based developmental mentoring networks. 20,37 In these more recent network approaches, the emphasis is on a constellation of career developmental and personally supportive relationships to design career experiences for individuals and to respond to the issues that these individuals, or mentees, express. 1,15 Developmental networks are valuable for achieving a variety of career outcomes ranging from promotion and career advancement 39 as well as clarity of professional identity, 16 to more variability of advice than a primary or sole mentor can achieve. 22 In addition, developmental networks are found to be gendered and racialized in the sense that women and individuals of color more often experience challenges in gaining access to and maintaining reliable and meaningful mentoring networks. Current research mainly focuses on mentoring in corporate settings. In academe, there is a growing body of research on undergraduate mentoring. However, few studies explore faculty mentoring processes in academic settings and none describe how faculty mentoring networks are enacted in ways that advantage and disadvantage particular group members such as women in engineering. 44 Our research expands the current literature by studying not only women faculty members’ mentoring relationships but also women engineers’ developmental mentoring network configurations. Furthermore, we explore an underresearched mentoring process known as episodic or spontaneous mentoring and mentoring moments. 1 As such, we contribute to muchneeded empirical research on women in STEM disciplines (science, technology, engineering, and math) that can help identify reasons for and strategies to combat women’s unequal participation in these occupations and careers. We do so through theoretical and methodological lenses unused previously in academic engineering contexts. Specifically, we examine women’s egocentric mentoring networks derived from qualitative interview data. Egocentric mentoring networks consist of individuals’ self-reported linkages between themselves (i.e., “ego” or hub of the network) and their career developmental “nodes”. 29 These network nodes can be resources, technology, and people that serve particular roles connected with departments, associations, institutions, agencies, and other organizations. 11 Guided by multiple network theories such as homophily, embeddedness, and social capital, our goal is twofold: to understand how women engineering faculty construct their mentoring networks; and to display and analyze women engineering faculty’s mentoring network configurations. To provide further context for these aims, we next supply an overview of mentoring research and social network constructs and theories that concludes with our two research questions. We follow this literature review with a detailed description of our research methods. We then present the findings based on the content and attributes of nodes as well as ties within the ego-centric mentoring networks. We conclude our paper by discussing our theoretical contributions and our findings’ pragmatic applications to women engineering faculty’s career development.