Women, work, and opportunities: From neoliberal to feminist mentoring

Abstract

AbstractWomen‐focused mentoring programs are often cited as an important tool to help address gender inequality at work. Despite their popularity, there remain questions about how useful they are at improving women’s career trajectories or transforming gender demographics at the organizational or industry level. A frequent critique of current women‐focused mentoring efforts is that they reflect and uphold neoliberal feminism and have shifted from collective support to an individualized focus on competition and accruing human and social capital. These programs encourage women to internalize neoliberal subjectivities and prescribe individual change while shoring up ideas about meritocracy that are utterly divorced from gender. I discuss how feminist mentoring, which takes central tenets of feminism including focusing on collective action and organizational change, can serve as a countermeasure to neoliberal feminism and how this form of mentorship can help address gender inequality at work.