Positive Value of a Women's Junior Faculty Mentoring Program: A Mentor-Mentee Analysis

Abstract

Background: Recently appointed women faculty in academic medicine face many challenges during their careers and can become overwhelmed managing their multiple faculty roles as teacher, scholar, and clinician, in addition to their roles in personal life. Although a mentor can be invaluable in assisting a woman junior faculty member to adjust to faculty life and providing critical career guidance, not all medical institutions have faculty mentoring programs. We created a mentoring program specifically for our women junior faculty to address this issue at our own institution.

Materials and methods: To assess the value of this program, we conducted a novel mentor-mentee paired-data analysis of annual surveys collected from 2010 to 2015. Of the 470 responses received, 83 were from unique mentees and 61 from unique mentors.

Results: Career development, research, and promotion were the top topics discussed among the mentoring pairs, followed by discussions of institutional resources and administration/service. There was high congruency among the mentoring pairs that they thought these discussions, as well as other conversations about mentee professional development and well-being, had been helpful. However in some instances, mentors felt they had not been helpful to their mentee, whereas their mentees felt otherwise; this finding speaks to the value and importance of mentees providing positive feedback to their mentors. Overall, both mentees and mentors thought that the mentees had significantly benefited from the mentorship. Unexpected outcomes of these relationships included promotion, grant applications/awards, articles, presentations, and professional memberships. The use of a Mentee Needs Assessment Form to individualize the mentoring relationship for each mentee may explain the high overall satisfaction and participant recommendations of the program.

Conclusions: Our findings demonstrate the value in establishing mentoring programs specifically for women faculty, especially in environments in which other mentoring opportunities do not exist.

Keywords: faculty; mentoring; paired data; women.