Online Women’s Organizations Posses Untapped Mentoring Resources
The Logic of Pseudo-Peer Mentoring with Online Women’s Organizations
Women’s organizations often make their impact on the world through mentoring, connecting successful women (and men) with youth who may want or need a mentor’s guidance. There are a number of variants of the mentoring strategy, but one of the most interesting new ways that more than one online community for women is promoting female leadership and development is through online mentoring.
Online mentoring opens up a number of exciting possibilities for average women, who are not down and out, but who just want a little help making intelligent choices. This isn’t the kind of mentoring strategy to help at-risk teens finish high-school or single mothers get their college degree. Many women’s organizations that offer online mentoring are helping women in their early and mid career connect with two sets of women that can help them.
The first and most obvious is women above them on the career ladder, whether that is two levels or more. But the second set is a network of “pseudo-mentors,” women who are in similar positions and facing or having just faced the same difficulties and questions that led the woman to seek a mentor in the first place. This type of mentoring has always been possible, but by facilitating it online, women’s organizations have enabled women to seek out mentors from anywhere. This creates the possibility to select mentors, or mentees, based on far more specific criteria. And by helping mentor-seeking women to communicate and connect with other similarly-positioned women, this mentor-web also harnesses the capacity for collaborative learning, development, and problem solving. New ideas can come directly from someone overcoming the same difficulties.
Of course, getting a mentor does not require a formal mentoring program. Any online women’s community can serve as a forum to find a mentor. But the best avenues will be deliberately constructed to make the process more efficient and effective, to make it easier to find a committed mentor and to match mentor-mentee backgrounds. The result is another way for women to use internet-based women’s networks to reach their goals.
