Women face extra barriers to mentorship, and mixed-gender professional relationships get sexualized
Evidence
Studies show that mentorship is an important part of career mobility and longevity in business in general, but that women face more barriers than men in finding a mentor due to a lack of women in upper-level management and the belief that there is too little common ground between men and women in the field to make cross-gender mentor-protégé relationships work. This mentoring problem is compounded in the technology industry since there are so few women in upper management. I found that relationships that might have been characterized as “networking” or “mentoring” between men were sexualized if one member of the dyad was female. — Alice E. Marwick, Status Update, 698
Categorization
- XREF: Connects to the broader literature on gendered labor and the sexualization of women’s professional competence; also parallels the envy/resentment dynamics already covered in earlier chapters. — connects to: The same professional relationship is labeled networking for men but sexualized for women — Alice E. Marwick, Status Update: Celebrity, Publicity,…, 699; Women’s tech careers were systematically credited to male mentors while men’s were not — Alice E. Marwick, Status Update: Celebrity, Publicity,…, 704; Marriage and career are structurally harder to combine for women than for men — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1932 (+4 more)
Broader Connections
- The same professional relationship is labeled networking for men but sexualized for women
#corroborates(0.85) — Alice E. Marwick, Status Update, 699 - Marriage and career are structurally harder to combine for women than for men
#complicates(0.72) — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1932 - Exploiting femininity to the extreme can paradoxically grant women near-masculine independence
#complicates(0.72) — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1684 - Women’s tech careers were systematically credited to male mentors while men’s were not
#corroborates(0.70) — Alice E. Marwick, Status Update, 704