Feminist Co-Mentoring: A Model for Academic Professional Development

In this paper, we critique the traditional model of mentoring in academia and offer an alternative model, co-mentoring, grounded in feminist principles. Our conception of co-mentoring challenges masculinist values of hierarchy, competition, and objectivity by emphasizing the importance of cooperative, non-hierarchical relationships for learning and development. Feminist co-mentoring seeks to dispel the view of the disembodied intellectual by attending to academics' familial, personal, and emotional needs. While co-mentoring is valuable for all academics, we argue that underrepresented groups can especially benefit from this type of relationship.