Mentoring programs are widely used for youth leadership development in higher education institutions and corporate settings, where building relationships between senior researchers (mentors) and junior researchers (mentees) provides younger people a support to face the challenges of an academic or research career.
The INFN Gender mentoring program, launched in 2018, was the first gender mentoring in an Italian research institution, designed with the intention of operating a transformation process within the organization starting from the younger generations (mentees) and by their mentors to improve gender equality in our institution.
The program provides participants with a tool to identify personal career goals through a critical reflection on their career path from a gender perspective.
Visibility and role models are fundamental in building careers, therefore the action of mentoring moves along two main lines:
- personal empowerment
- the generation of a transformative process for raising awareness of the gender dimension within the institution and research.
The mentoring experiences carried out in other realities testify, in fact, that the most experienced researchers and the sponsoring institution also benefit from the programmes. In fact, the mentors, in addition to receiving personal satisfaction in providing support to younger colleagues, see their work networks strengthen and, at the same time, their awareness of the gender dimension in research grows, while the institution takes advantage the construction of a trans-disciplinary network in the culture of collegiality and the valorisation of one’s own resources.
The gender mentoring model, including some operational tools, was designed by researchers at the University of Naples “Federico II” following an evaluation study that took into account the specific needs and organization of INFN