It takes a village - overcoming gender-biased mentorship in academia

Effective mentoring implies a two-way relationship in which mentees obtain benefits from the knowledge and training provided by mentors, and mentors gain the possibility of contemplating and learning new perspectives, of self-evaluating their roles and, in consequence, growing as professionals. Mentorship relationships cannot be separated from cultural and societal backgrounds. Thus, they often reflect systemic biases requiring active effort to counteract institutional inequities. Such efforts, particularly when formalized as programs, expand training opportunities for both mentors and mentees. Mentorship networks, in which multiple mentor-mentee relationships are involved, therefore increase collective performance by magnifying resources. Importantly, mentorship exceeds the relationships of students and their direct supervisors (often reflected in co-authorship in publications), and in fact, mentors are often purposely picked outside the direct publication network. A recent large data analysis by AlShebli et al. (2020) showed results of presumed “mentor-protege” relationships after mining millions of coauthor pairs in publications over time, suggesting gender-insensitive changes in institutional mentorship policies based on value-skewed academic success. Because mentorship engages a broader sense of community in academia, mentorship outcomes cannot be quantified solely by the impact of publications.