Mentorship has been crucial to this speaker's career, but data from Lean In shows many men now avoid mentoring women out of post-#MeToo anxiety. The speaker argues mentorship shouldn't be limited by gender or looks, and highlights reverse mentoring, where younger people mentor senior colleagues. The concrete advice: reach out directly with a specific ask, whether a virtual coffee or email.
when you got started, how did mentorship play a role? Because that was a piece Nicole wanted to know about as well.
For me, it has been crucial, and I always encourage mentoring. The only thing that I'm seeing is like a lot of men are getting scared of mentoring women after all this Me Too. That's the data I get from Lean In. And I think it's time that we get over that and we don't put excuses. Issues. It doesn't matter if you are mentored by a man or by a woman. I happen to be mentored by a woman, and I like women mentoring women, but I think it's also time to break the barriers of biases and not always try to mentor someone that looks like you, which is what we come across too, right? And try to reach out to people that doesn't look like you, because I'm also— something that I'm seeing a lot happening is the reverse mentoring. He's like, now my mentor asked me, can you mentor me? I was like, what do you mean I mentor you? He's like, yeah, I want to learn what you know. You are super good at tech, you know a lot of things that I'm different generation, I don't know, can you mentor me? And I'm seeing this happening more and more as well. So it's good to reach out to mentoring. I think mentoring is crucial for me, that's my opinion. And I would totally encourage everyone to reach out for mentorship. Actually, I just last week, I reached out to someone that I admire, that I like how she's working. Again, call, virtual coffee. And then I sent an email and I was like, hey, would you be willing to, like, are you looking into mentoring or maybe, I proposed a few different things like advisor for my company or mentoring. And she was like super happy. She's like, yeah, let's exchange some mentoring within the next month. And I'm like, it's about reaching out and putting ego on the side and just reach out. That's my advice, at least.
