Mentoring women in the public sector: expectations and realities

Though many government agencies use mentoring programmes to advance women, there is a little research investigating whether mentoring produces significantly different results for women than men in the public sector. This paper investigates the role of mentoring in advancing the careers of women in the public sector by testing a series of hypotheses about the relationships between gender, mentor type (formal/informal and internal/external), and the outcomes of mentoring. The findings indicate that participating in mentorships increases public managers' career outcomes, measured as protege promotion and the number of employees supervised by the protege. Furthermore, though women are more likely to have female mentors, mentoring outcomes do not significantly vary by mentor gender. These findings point to the importance of mentoring in the public sector and call into question the focus on mentoring as a tool for advancing women in particular.