Mentoring for Women Academics: a Review of the Literature and Proposition for Future Research

We aim to review literature on mentoring in academia, with a focus on women at an early stage of their academic career: mentoring has been recognised as an important instrument to foster careers and address the gender imbalance in science. However, while mentoring initiatives for women academics are flourishing, most of these experiences are not discussed in scholarly literature: this does not help to understand the role and implications of mentoring in women’s academic careers and in fostering gender equality in universities. Furthermore, empirical literature underlines that there is not an agreement on the definition of mentoring; indeed, such literature is often poorly grounded from a theoretical and conceptual point of view. This means that drawing comparisons among different studies is challenging, and also, learning from best practices is compromised. This literature review maps and discusses research on academic mentoring for women: more specifically, we aim to detect the challenges associated with academic mentoring, and provide categories and concepts to scholars in education and management for conducting future research.