Poster presented at Gender Summit GS7, Berlin 2015. 

Mentoring programs are commonly used to help individual women advance in their careers. We report on a successful mentoring program that uses innovative design to address organisational change, as well as individual development. The program has been operating in the Faculty of Medicine, Dentistry and Health Sciences (MDHS), The University of Melbourne, Australia since 2011, and is currently in its fifth year of implementation. The Faculty has 2200 employees, with 70% academic and 30% administrative staff. Women are under-represented in senior faculty, with women only totalling to 28% of all professors. 

Poster presented at Gender Summit GS7, Berlin 2015.

Sponsorship is increasingly recognized as separate to, and distinct from mentoring. In many respects it has eclipsed mentoring, with claims that it is a key ingredient in building careers and often a ‘missing ingredient’ for women. Despite this popular embracing of there is a research gap regarding sponsorship practices within higher education and research institutions. 

We report on a successful staff mentoring program within the Faculty of Medicine, Dentistry and Health Sciences (MDHS) at the University of Melbourne, Australia. The program commenced in 2011, and is currently in its fifth year of implementation. 

The aim of the mentoring program is two fold: to create an organisational culture and environment where MDHS staff feel valued and nurtured, while at the same time, enabling individual staff to reach their full potential. 

This report is an evaluation of a program designed and facilitated by Jen de Vries.

The Program formed part of the Faculty’s Equal Opportunity for Women initiatives. The aims of the Program were to contribute to a culture and environment in which women staff in the Faculty feel valued and supported to “navigate, survive, and thrive” in their work environment, and reach their full potential. The Program was intended to help maximise the participation of women staff in senior leadership roles in the Faculty by increasing individual staff members’ ability to meet their career goals. An additional objective for the Faculty was the building of a body of mentoring experience and expertise amongst all staff in the Faculty. 

This article was not written by Jen de Vries.

The Faculty of Medicine, Dentistry and Health Sciences implemented a mentoring program using Jen de Vries as their consultant. The program targeted Level B academic staff and Level 8 professional staff and on Jen's advice adopted both one to one mentoring and peer mentoring as complementary strategies. 

The Evaluation report of the pilot program strongly endorses the bifocal approach and the design and facilitation of the program. 

This chapter results from a keynote address delivered in Switzerland to the European Mentoring Network (eument-net) in 2010. It draws on Jen's doctoral research and the mentoring component of Leadership Development for Women at the University of Western Australia. It explores the capacity of mentoring programs to contribute to gender change and outlines a mentoring continuum as a way of understanding mentoring relationships.

There is considerable literature about the impact of mentoring on the mentees but little is known about the effect of the mentoring relationship on the mentor. This paper aims to address that gap.

The paper assists academics and practitioners to conceive of mentoring as a core element in an effective organisational change intervention. The innovation is to move mentoring away from assuming a deficit model of the mentee. As this programme shows, a focus on what needs to change in the dominant organisational culture, practices and values can lead to key players in the organisation becoming actively involved in the needed change process.