Why Sponsorship Beats Mentorship for Trades #Retention

So your research found that women are sponsored half as often as they're mentored. I'm pretty sure I know the answer to this. Let's make it really clear. What's the real consequence of that gap?

There is a lot of research aside from ours that shows that sponsorship definitely is more effective at advancing women's careers. So we're losing talent. We're seeing people, um, walk out the door. Before we did that research and found out that women truly were being sponsored much less than they were mentored, because we knew that, but we didn't know-know it, and now we know-know it. I think it really uncovers the next phase of the work that we need to do in this industry. So it's not to say that, oh, we're going to stop workforce development or that we can't— we can stop recruiting. We obviously need to continue full throttle with all of that stuff. But I do think that we need to start talking about what happens after we bring people into the industry.