The mentoring of women for medical career development

Abstract

Purpose -In Germany, scientific qualifications and an academic career in medical disciplines require mastering and balancing clinical, research and teaching activities. Systematic interdisciplinary human resource development is rare in German medical faculties. The purpose of this paper is to describe the MediMent programme, which is a model for systematic interdisciplinary support of early-and mid-phase career development for medical academics. It comprises mentoring, training and networking modules tailored for pre-and post-doctoral students at the Medical Faculty. It contributes to organisational development and reducing gender inequality by an affirmative action programme for women. The programme supports individual career-building, teaches networking skills for an interdisciplinary workplace and assists in conflict resolution. Design/methodology/approach -Mentors and mentees provided feedback via standardised forms. Additional open-ended questions were interpreted by content analysis. Statistics were prepared using SPSS. Findings -Evaluation of the first six-year programme run revealed several benefits, indicating the trio of mentoring, networking and the accompanying seminar series efficiently supports career development of young medical academics. Participating mentees felt they achieved career goals within the mentoring programme. Evaluations indicated a strong potential for future investment in the organisation through better training, improving institutional visibility and stimulating recruitment of excellent students. Originality/value -The success of the MediMent programme described in the paper recommends it for implementation at other institutions.

Social capital and career advancement of female academic staff in Nigerian universities

“…Past studies on career advancement showed that mentoring is an important variable in explaining female career advancement. This result is consistent with the other findings within the discourse community (Abalkhail and Allan, 2015;Patwardhan et al, 2015;Petersen et al, 2012;Arokiasamy et al, 2011;Okurame, 2008;Searby et al, 2015). Furthermore, Blood et al (2012) stressed that mentoring and its availability and accessibility lead to career advancement because mentoring promotes staff skills and knowledge.…”

Mentoring in a Medical Faculty - Chance for Organisational Learning

“…In the following, we describe both mentoring structures (One-on-One and peermentoring) in detail (see also Petersen et al, 2012). Both programs satisfy the quality standards of the German Federal Association for Mentoring in Science (Wolf and Bertke, 2017).…”

“…In the MediMent One-on-One program, female scientists are offered the opportunity to build a one-on-one mentoring relationship with a professor or a habilitated 2 faculty member of the Medical Faculty. The mentoring relationship is not hierarchically defined and is free from subordination (see Petersen et al, 2012). The special incentive of this form of human resource development is the unique relationship between mentee and mentor, which allows a free development of mentoring topics and is accompanied by the professional support program.…”

“…The special incentive of this form of human resource development is the unique relationship between mentee and mentor, which allows a free development of mentoring topics and is accompanied by the professional support program. Mentors help with access to scientific networks (Segermann-Peck, 1991), which is especially difficult for young women due to the hierarchical structures within the medical field (Petersen et al, 2012). In addition to the one-on-one mentoring relationships, interdisciplinary composed peer groups among the female scientists of the same program run are matched with one another (see Figure 1).…”

“…Mentors also indicated that the MediMent program helped them to increase their own contacts and prompted reflection on their own leadership experiences and personal careers. By interacting freely with their mentees, mentors gained new insights into the situation of young (female) medical academics (Petersen et al, 2012).…”