The Mentoring of Nonprofessional, Nonmanagerial Women Who Are Pursuing Upward Career Mobility

294 p.Thesis (Educat.D.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1982.Developing a mentoring relationship with a person of influence has been reported to be an effective strategy for individuals desiring upward career mobility. Because women have unique problems based in their socialization it has been asserted that mentors will be keys to their upward mobility. However, women in business find few women mentors and because it is rare for women to be tapped for mentoring by male corporate officers an insidious cycle results: women do not advance rapidly because they lack the insights mentors can give them--and, because the problem exists there are few women who can become mentors for other women.Since teaching and counseling, two functions of mentoring, are within the realm of education, the purpose of the study was to identify mentoring functions that are educational so programmatic interventions which will better prepare female students for climbing corporate career ladders can be designed and tested. Recommendations for future research and development in this area are made.Since the investigation was an analytical study of a specific phenomenon, field research techniques were employed. It was limited to a unique population, 21 women whose belated desires for upward mobility led them to pursue baccalaureate degrees as adult students in a nontraditional degree program. Three questionnaires were used to gather data on family background, personal attributes, and work attitudes. Subjects participated in one or more one to two hour interviews. Eleven subjects had at least one career mentor. The other ten subjects had not had career mentors.Findings include brief descriptions of the women: their early life and work experiences, their perceptions of self, factors motivating their desires for upward mobility, and their views on the reality of the work setting for them as well as descriptions of the mentors and mentoring relationships they experienced. Questionnaire data on achievement motivation, parental attributes, work/family orientation, locus of control and self-esteem are reported and comparisons are made between mentored and nonmentored subjects. The roles mentoring (or lack of mentoring) played in the career development of the subjects are discussed.U of I OnlyRestricted to the U of I community idenfinitely during batch ingest of legacy ETD