As a map to the mentoring scene this article is nicely informative - Scutt names and thus brings into view many aspects of how mentoring can function. In particular she confirms my experience of the uselessness of networking, and explains why I have sought mentoring myself - to no avail whatsoever, I might add. Maybe I have just been looking in the wrong places. But I think there is a deeper reason. What is missing from this article is an understanding of the deeper structures of human relationship. Male bonding, the male interest in male-male bonding, the stuff of which armies are made, and which has a long history not only of happening without recommendations and conferences and papers to get it moving, has an erotic foundation. This may never express itself physically, and may be denied fervently. Regardless of which...... Now a male-female mentoring relationship can be established on a non-sexual basis, although the sexual interest is probably closer to the surface, which is why it is so vulnerable to accusation and denigration. Yet I think we can disapprove or advise against this all we like, and sit still won't make much difference. If women want to enter hitherto male areas of the social domain, this has to be one of the main avenues by which they will be able to do this. Advice on adroit handling of this relationship is therefore probably going to be more useful than jumping up and down and saying it shouldn't happen.
(Continued in next post)

(Continued from previous post) There is an even more distressing aspect of Scutt's advice however, which is that if women take what she has to say as a real guide to action, it immediately cuts heterosexual women out of the game - again! Railing against Sigmund Freud is far less useful than actually learning to understand the role of the unconscious in our conscious daily lives. The women's movement was pretty much hi-jacked by lesbians almost from the outset. Betty Friedan may have written about 'the problem that had no name' that made women locked up in suburban homes so depressed. But when it came to organising women as a movement, the lesbian tone dominated, and heterosexual women were distinctly left out of the loop. The women's movement was loathe, for instance, to acknowledge women's lives incorporated (literally) babies. It took till the 80's for babies to get a small fraction of real attention in feminist literature.If taken seriously this paper would work to strengthen lesbian access to the business world at the top, and once more relegate straight women to small businesses that are home-based, and focussed on enterprises such as making quilts for cots, or jams for the kitchen, primarily, even if not exclusively, in small localities.

None of what I have said should detract from acknowledging the paper's value in identifying mentoring as a far more powerful theoretical handle than networking in mapping a route to the top. I have elsewhere recommended that sociologists and others abandon a flat earth view of social relationships as ideally egalitarian, in favour of an 'historical' grasp of the key importance of vertical bonding in social process.

dear veritas

thank you for your comments. just a note - all women have at one time or another received welcome support from at least one other woman (whether acknowledged or not). and not all the women receiving support - far from it - nor all the women giving support - far from it - are of a particularly sexual orientation. similarly, the women in Living Generously - Women Mentoring Women, are not all allied to one particular sexual orientation.

fortunately women are capable of supporting one another whatever sexual orientation either woman may have.

every good wish, jas

I suggest it is fair to say that some women are capable of mentoring some women irrespective of sexual orientation. Gay bashing isn't restricted to the domain of heterosexual males.

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