A recent radio story on National Public Radio caught my interest. In essence, the commentator said that when it comes to moving up the corporate ranks, “women are mentored, but men are sponsored.” I have to say I’d never thought much about the difference between mentorship and sponsorship, and I don’t know that this necessarily is exclusively a gender-based behavior, either. Certainly, though, there is a difference between mentorship and sponsorship.
At a previous corporation where I worked, people always referred to the fact that if you were lucky, you had your godfathers in the background. And you may or may not have known who they were, but these godfathers were the people who were keeping an eye on you and ensuring that opportunities arose for you. I think some people referred to that as luck, and when promotions were handed out they said, “Oh, that lucky devil. How did he get that great role?” And that’s because one’s godfathers were looking out for one.
For me, mentorship is something that’s generally very open, and that applies to men and women equally. Sponsorship is far more selective, is most often hidden, and if there are biases, that’s where they may come out. Or they may not come out at all, but the effect may be felt. The effect may be in one case that John gets the promotion while Jane doesn’t. Their mentorship might be the same, but it may well be that there’s something else operating that’s more like sponsorship. Of course, this also works the other way around. I’ve seen it where women get the plum promotion and you think, “Well, how did that happen? And why did that particular promotion take place?” And again, as you drill into it, you find out that sponsorship played a role.
While I believe in 2015 that it’s a dangerous generalization to say that only men are sponsored, the phenomenon probably does still favor men because the sponsors are men, by and large. That’s just something that will take time to break down.
I’m very fortunate because I have had some great women bosses over my career, and so I think I make a pretty conscious effort to ensure that I don’t fall prey to my natural biases. Is there a glass ceiling in IT, though? I don’t necessarily believe that anymore. I think there might be a glass maze that you have to find your way through, and it helps to have somebody showing you the way through the maze, but again that’s no longer gender-specific.
One of the things I do in my life outside of IT is work as a pilot on search-and-rescue missions for U.S. Civil Air Patrol. I also work with young cadets there. Flying, like IT, is a very heavily male-oriented environment. And it’s one of these things that present absolutely no rationale, but you can’t ignore that the cadets who join CAP at 12 to 15 equal out at 50-50 boys versus girls. And from then on, it drifts. The girls drift away, and the boys remain. So by the time they get to 18 or 19, it’s probably 80 percent men versus 20 percent women. At Hyatt, my IT group was probably about 80/20; at Pillsbury, it was probably about 60/40. Pearson was close to 50/50. Northwest was probably about 55/45. I also don’t know of a single organization that is not actively trying to solve this particular question.
About a year ago now, I had an interesting conversation with three of the women in my team after work. And even amongst the women around the table, there were vastly different views of what the environment was. One of the women felt that gender discrimination was alive and well and prevalent throughout the company where we worked. One of the others, a consultant who has moved around a lot, and actually one of the people I used to work for a few years ago when I was a consultant, said that was nonsense. I still remember her saying, “I got everything that I worked for.” As for the third woman, she was somewhere in the middle. It was a fascinating discussion.
I’d be interested to hear the perspectives of both men and women readers of this article: Is there still gender bias in IT? And if there is, what are you doing to rectify it?
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In Cliff's article, he states, "...girls drift away, and the boys remain." To find out more, download this Harvard Business Review article, "Stopping the exodus of women in science."
Cliff Tamplin has held a variety of roles with major global corporations including Barclays, M&M Mars, Diageo, Northwest Airlines and Hyatt Hotels & Resorts. These roles have spanned application design and development; infrastructure architecture and operations; and information security. Cliff has been with Hyatt Hotels & Resorts for six years, with responsibility for technical services and information security for Hyatt’s 500+ hotels in 45+ countries. Hyatt is an early adopter of the concepts of cloud computing and has moved the majority of its systems to “as a service” providers. Having run many large data centers in the past, Cliff is enjoying the challenges of operating in this new paradigm. Cliff is originally from England and has worked in various countries in Europe and Asia prior to and since relocating to the USA. Cliff is a pilot who flies search and rescue missions for the Civil Air Patrol. He has two grown sons who have followed him into the IT business and is married to Sally who practices homeopathy.
