Spanning the Gender Gap in Mentoring

Boys, Girls, and Mentoring Relationships

Surprisingly few studies have examined how gender shapes youth mentoring relationships. Consequently, key questions regarding gender differences in mentoring remain unanswered. Understanding the influence of gender is important because, although few programs take it into explicit consideration when conducting trainings or supervising matches, there is reason to believe that gender differences might affect mentoring. In this Research Corner, I will review what is known about gender in mentoring relationships with the goal of providing some guidance to the field. Since most formal mentoring programs involve same-sex matches, my focus will be on how boys' relationships may differ from those of females.

Gender and Relationships

Findings from social and developmental psychology and sociolinguist research, as well as studies of mentoring relationships in professional contexts, shed important light on how gender may affect adult-youth mentoring.

Psychology and Psycholinguist Research

Social psychologists have observed that girls and women are socialized to be more caring and nurturing, whereas boys and men are socialized to be more instrumental in their approach to helping others. As a result, males and females tend to respond differently to helping relationships. Indeed, in their 1986 meta-analysis of helping behavior, Eagly and Crowley found that men offered and responded more to instrumental, heroic and chivalrous forms of helping, while women offered and responded more to social, nurturing and caring forms of helping.

The same holds true for women's versus men's friendships; the former tend to be more communal, whereas the latter tend to be more instrumental. The roots of this difference appear to begin in childhood. Compared to boys' friendships, girls' friendships tend to be predicated more on intimacy, empathy and self-disclosure. Moreover, girls are more likely than boys to turn to their friends in times of distress, seeking help and emotional support.

In her book, You Just Don't Understand: Men and Women in Conversation, sociolinguist Deborah Tannen argues that "boys and girls grow up in what are essentially different cultures" where they develop different ways of communicating. She describes how girls and women use "rapport-talk," while boys and men communicate with "report-talk."

Boys learn in childhood to maintain relationships primarily through their activities (often sports), so conversation for males often involves competition, reflecting whether "he [is] either one-up or one-down." Consequently, men tend to try to keep the upper hand in conversation, protecting themselves from others' perceived attempts to put them down.

Girls, on the other hand, are socialized as children to believe that "talk is the glue that holds relationships together." Consequently, when women talk with each other, they are essentially building community, with their conversations serving as "negotiations for closeness." Such differences, which Tannen has documented across several studies, are likely to have implications for mentoring relationships.

Adult Career Mentoring Research

Research on career mentoring may shed additional light on this topic. In her influential review paper, "Gender in Mentoring Relationships," Ragins (1999) argued that gender is a consideration in adult-adult mentoring relationships because females, as a group, have less power and confront more sexism than males and, consequently, female mentees might be perceived as needing more protection than male mentees.

Empirical studies regarding gender differences in career mentoring relationships have been inconsistent. Nonetheless, several studies have shown that male mentors tend to provide more instrumental and career support, whereas female mentorships are more often characterized by a greater degree of emotional support.

For example, Allen & Eby (2004) surveyed over 391 mentors and found support for this gender difference in support provision. Female mentees tend to be more comfortable conforming to gender expectations in providing support, as they may sense that their mentees need emotional support.

Gender in Teacher-Student Relationships

Since 70% of K-12 teachers are females, a look at teacher-student relationships might provide insights into how the growing number of boys vs. girls fares with female mentors. Researchers have noted teachers' preferences for students with cooperative and responsive styles, which are more typical of girls.

Indeed, teachers rate their relationships with their female students as closer and less confliction than their relationships with their male students, a difference that is readily perceived by students. This suggests that mentors might ultimately form closer relationships with girls.

Still others have presented a more complex picture of the role of gender in shaping teacher-student relationships. Brophy and Hancock (1985), for example, observed that teachers react more to student behavior than to their gender. Other factors, including a student's attachment history and personality, are also likely to shape relationships.

Gender in Youth Mentoring

Taken together, these findings and observations have important implications for youth mentoring programs. Mentors might be recruited differently, and in different numbers. Girls and boys may be referred to and form relationships differently, thrive under different approaches to mentoring and have different responses to terminations.

Recruitment of Mentors

Although the female mentors have always outnumbered male mentors, there is growing concern that the gender gulf in volunteering is growing. Consequently, more programs are relying on women mentors to work with young boys, and/or consigning boys to relatively longer periods on the waiting list.

Compounding this shortage is the particular lack of African American and Latino men to serve as mentors to the large pool of minority male mentees who are referred to programs.

Programs have begun to develop creative solutions to this problem--aggressively recruiting male volunteers through public awareness and marketing strategies and strategic partnerships with organizations.

The Mentoring Partnership of New York, for example, launched a Male Mentoring Project that involved a concerted campaign to recruit male mentors to New York City's mentoring programs.

Referrals

Although there are many exceptions, there is some evidence that girls and boys are referred to mentoring programs for different reasons. Whereas single mothers will often refer their sons because the sons lack positive male role models, girls are often referred because of problems in the mother-daughter relationship.

Indeed, according to the national Big Brothers Big Sisters outcome study, when girls were initially referred to the mentoring program, they reported significantly lower overall attachment to their parents (typically mothers), including lower levels of parental trust and higher levels of alienation.

Relationship Formation

Troubled parental relationships, in turn, might make it more difficult for girls to establish mentoring relationships because of an insecure attachment style or, more concretely, because of the mother's key logistical role in supporting the mentoring relationship (e.g., providing transportation, etc.).

Girls may also have more difficulty forming solid relationships due to program-level problems. Co-educational youth programming is often provided by agencies that formerly catered solely to boys.

In a four-year study of youth programming, researcher Molly Mead (2001) concluded that many programs did not serve girls as effectively as boys: "the result was a mismatch between the program's design and girls' interests and concerns—a mismatch that caused girls to be marginalized, their needs to be unmet and their potential to be unrealized."

Although this is less of a problem in decentralized mentoring programs, group activities, trainings and other aspects of mentoring programs may still retain some of the vestiges of their former all-male approach.

Approach to Relationships

As in career-mentoring relationships, males and females in youth mentoring might approach and respond to the relationships differently. Instrumental mentoring, with its more problem-focused, goal-oriented approach, may appeal more to boys, whereas psychosocial mentoring, which relies primarily on the interpersonal relationship, may be a better approach for girls.

Of course, mentors should take their cues from their mentees to strike a comfortable balance between having fun, working toward practical goals and exploring emotions. Irrespective of whether a mentee is a boy or girl, good mentors are sensitive to their mentees' circumstances and input and the mentors calibrate their approach accordingly.

Margaret Beam and colleagues noted that more than 80% of adults whom adolescents described as being "very important" to them were perceived to have some combination of the following traits: providing emotional support, showing respect for the adolescent, offering availability as someone to talk to and supporting the adolescent's engagement in activities.

Termination

My colleagues and I have found that girls in Big Brother Big Sister mentoring relationships were slightly more likely than boys to terminate each month.

At the same time, girls' more communal and socially oriented style may heighten their vulnerability to difficulties and earlier-than-expected terminations. Since girls' relationships tend to shape identity formation and adjustment to a greater degree than boys' relationships, early terminations might be more distressing for girls.

This vulnerability may be especially salient among the at-risk youth to whom mentoring programs cater. According to the United States Government Accountability Office (1995), "the forces of poverty can show some of their most debilitating effects on young at-risk teen girls."

Where Do We Go from Here?

More research is clearly needed in order to reconcile the contradictory findings in the existing literature and, more importantly, to improve the fit between girls' and boys' differing needs and mentoring program services.

This research will not be without challenges. The existing literature cannot differentiate whether the findings reported are due to youth gender, mentor gender or some combination of both.

A plethora of other factors, including race of youth and mentor, and program- and parent-level match support, may also contribute to current findings. It will be crucial in the future to design studies that account for these potentially confounding factors.

For now, though, mentoring programs would do well to begin to consider the existing research on boys' and girls' differing approaches to relationships, and to support these different needs and styles with mentor training and support activities.