Mentors can help women shatter glass ceiling

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At Sun Microsystems, Katy Dickinson, who heads up the company’s mentoring program, often sees women who are self-effacing and hesitant to put themselves forward. But the computer company’s mentoring program, in place since 2000, has helped many women “learn to say, ‘I did something well,’” she says.

Alas, women still don’t get the mentoring help they need as often as their male counterparts. Of those firms offering executive coaching to their employees, about 20 percent say women receive the service at a lower rate than men, according to one survey of 3,000 human resource professionals by Novations Group, a Boston-based employee training company. There was some good news, though. About 75 percent of those polled say women receive about the same amount of mentoring as men, while nearly 6 percent say females get more coaching.

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It paid off for Tammi Gatling. Early on in her career at Chubb Group of Insurance Cos., she was apprehensive and nervous about taking the initiative when it came to advancing her career but mentors helped set her on the right path. The manager that hired her at Chubb in 1995 became one of her first mentors, and the relationship developed because Gatling would go in and bounce ideas off of the manager and ask her advice.

While that relationship was informal, she signed up for Chubb’s formal mentoring program in 2003, and became an official mentee to Pat Key, who runs Chubb’s Women’s Development Council Mentoring Program.

“Pat taught me how to talk to my manager about what skill sets I might be lacking,” Gatling says.

The mentoring program has helped boost the number of women senior vice presidents at Chubb to 23 percent last year from 16 percent in 2001, and women holding the executive vice president title jumped to 17 percent from zero over the same period.

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Women, Key explains, “were socialized differently than men, told not to speak up, to work hard and you’ll be noticed. But having someone to help guide you a bit, and having an interactive relationship with a role model is very critical to giving you a vision of what you can be in work place.”

It worked for Gatling. “I wanted to have a successful career and be a good mother, and my goal was to earn the assistant vice president title. I thought who better to ask about career goals but a person at Chubb who already had succeeded.”

Today she is an assistant vice president and a mother of two. “My next goal is vice president,” and she’s not embarrassed to say it.

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