Is It time to Disrupt Mentorship?
The question of whether mentorship models work for women and other equity seeking groups has unexpectedly preoccupied me for the last 10 years. Sifting through my research for my book The Feminist Mentorship Gap , which is currently in progress, I am wondering whether there is a need to completely disrupt mentorship in all its various modes. Is it time to disrupt mentorship? Mentorship has been around a long, long time. The first use of the word and depiction of a “mentor” appears in Book II of Homer’s Odyssey . Before leaving for the Trojan War, Odysseus asks his friend Mentor to not simply look after Telemachus, his son, but to prepare him to lead. Right now, you may be thinking, “that’s nice, but besides being a completely boring cocktail party factoid or possible Jeopardy question, so what?” Which is a totally reasonable response. But it does directly relate to mentorship today. In addition to spawning the word mentorship, this passage framed the way mentorship and