Mentorship in academia is essential to both the success of students and the advancement of faculty. These guiding relationships include a gender complexity within academia. To better understand this dynamic, 36 women of varying academic positions were interviewed and surveyed about their experiences of mentorship in higher education. Viewing this complex relationship through the job embeddedness theory, thematic analysis of the data revealed a primary theme detailing mentorship on a continuum from investment to exploitive. The continuum includes (a) contextual influences, (b) relational experiences, and (c) impact, each of which has implications for academia and academic women, including mentors and mentees. In consideration of these implications, we offer recommendations for universities, mentors, and mentees centered around fit and links, including the importance of availability and vulnerability, shared identity and focus, as well as consideration of sacrifice, each of which is a foundational aspect of the job embeddedness theory.
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Brown et al. (2025) studied this question.
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