The Mentor Gap
Older women eagerly provide advice, but young women often don't like what they hear
For Lara Hall-Bennett, the relationship was definitely devoid of chemistry. At 25, already the marketing director of a Utah nursing home, she'd just enrolled in a college extension class to add an M.B.A. to her fast-track resume. But when she met the corporate mentor she'd been assigned--a healthcare whiz twice her age--she felt they were talking in alien tongues. "We just didn't really connect," Hall-Bennett says. "This woman was entirely focused on her career, and she'd tell me about all the sacrifices you have to make. She worked so many hours that she was just not available to her family most of the time. It's certainly not what I wanted in life."
Now, two years later, Hall-Bennett is marketing director of Womenforhire.com, a New York-based recruiting firm, where she has discovered she isn't alone in rejecting that old workaholic role model or her mentor's worldview. At companies nationwide, a new crop of women is increasingly reporting a disconnect with the veterans of the gender wars who had to fight their way to corporate America's front lines. Not only are today's 20-somethings toting a different set of expectations and anxieties to the office, many also feel that mentors are deaf to the latest business buzzword, work-life balance.
"There's definitely a generational difference," says Stacy Blake-Beard, a mentoring expert at Simmons College School of Management in Boston, which offers an M.B.A. program aimed exclusively at women. "So many young people are saying they don't want to move up in a career because they don't like what life looks like at the top."
In the open. That generational divide has been a touchy, if not downright taboo, topic for feminists--one they fear threatens to revive grim stereotypes. But with the growing exodus of young women from both corporations and law firms, the subject is emerging from behind closed boardroom doors. Last week, the U.S.-based International Women's Forum, a 4,000-member group of top female achievers, built its annual conference in Toronto around that thorny generational theme. "What we're trying to do is get the two generations to talk to one another--and listen," says conference cochair Ann Medina, 60. "Mentoring isn't just about mentoring down. It's a two-way street. Younger women can teach us a lot, too."
That need to rethink the mentoring process may hardly come as welcome news to corporations that have spent millions formalizing a concept once proffered as a silver bullet to win more women entree to the executive suite. According to Catalyst, a firm that tracks female corporate progress, 76 percent of 106 top firms it surveyed two years ago boasted formal mentoring programs. And many, like accounting and consulting giant Deloitte, report striking payoffs. In the 10 years since Deloitte introduced its mentoring initiative, the number of women partners has mushroomed from 97 to more than 600.
But last year, the number of top female officers in the Fortune 500 was still below 16 percent. That may explain why a growing number of new female recruits are heading for the corporate exit, many to start their own companies. "Let's face it, if this great mentoring that's supposed to be going on today was actually working" says IWF conference cochair Alison Youngman, "we'd have a lot more women in executive positions."
In law firms, promising young female associates are leaving at a brisker rate than their male counterparts, despite the fact that at least half of the country's law school graduates are now women. According to a report last month by the National Association for Law Placement in Washington, D.C., 8.9 percent of female attorneys quit their practices after slightly more than a year, compared with 6.9 percent of men. So concerned is the American Bar Association that it launched a nationwide study on how to boost women's prospects for partnership. The results will be released next month. Among the solutions: Instead of drumming up business on traditional male turf such as the golf course, some female attorneys are courting potential clients with invitations to family outings like football games.
But for Bettina Lawton, a Virginia attorney who chaired the study, the most striking message to emerge from the focus groups was the scorn young female lawyers voiced for senior women, who had often passed up marriage or motherhood on their long plod toward partnership. "The 20- and 30-year-olds were saying, `We don't respect the choices you made,' " Lawton says. "Partnership is not the be-all and end-all anymore."
As Exhibit A, she offers Jennifer McHugh, who left the Washington, D.C., office of the international law firm Dechert in 1999 after five years. Now 35, McHugh is a senior attorney at the Securities and Exchange Commission, where her clout is sufficient to terrify former clients, but her workweeks have been cut by one third. At the SEC, she puts in the 40 hours a week that once demoted her to part-time status in her old practice and the slow lane on the partnership track. But she can count on nights and weekends with her kids, ages 1, 5, and 6. "For my generation, the trail has already been blazed," McHugh says, "and we feel there are other things that are more important to us than becoming partner."
In virtually every major corporation, variations on that mantra are often provoking consternation. But some pioneers, like Nancy Hutson, Pfizer's senior vice president of global research and development, hail the new generation's candor about fitting their high-pressure careers around family life. "Women 10 to 20 years ago had those issues, but they didn't dare talk about it," she says. The first time the childless Hutson heard one of her young female scientists voice a determination to have it all, she admits she was shocked. "I wish I'd had the courage to do that," Hutson says. "I assumed I had to make a choice."
High hopes. Still, Becky Blalock, the 48-year-old chief information officer for Atlanta's Southern Co., a huge energy firm, confesses to bristling at the blithe expectations of the young women she meets who proclaim they intend to become CEO. "They want it all, and they want it now," she says. "Am I such a dinosaur, saying, `You've got to pay your dues'?"
One of the chief disenchantments with mentoring is that some female corporate icons appear to lack the listening gene. "There was this sage, this wise godmother, and you went to her for the right answers," says Simmons's Blake-Beard. "If you followed her instructions, she'd help you produce a clone of herself."
Still, even when there is two-way communication, a mentoring relationship can prove as vulnerable to bad vibes as a mismatch on The Bachelor. That's why Blake-Beard recommends that young women seek out their own corporate guides. "Once you formalize the relationship, you also politicize it," she says. "I get calls all the time from women saying, `How do I get out of this without ruining my career?' "
But former Catalyst President Sheila Wellington, author of Be Your Own Mentor, argues that unless company policies are spelled out, women may lose the networking opportunities that helped level the corporate playing field. That prospect might not hurt the current crop of wannabe Carly Fiorinas, who are breezing into middle management with unprecedented confidence, supportive partners, and little of the domestic guilt that their predecessors felt. But feminists like Wellington worry about the generation that will shape tomorrow's corporate landscape.
A study last year by Simmons College and the Committee of 200, a Chicago-based association of female entrepreneurs, showed today's teens see business as a turnoff, a grim world of dull cubicles, sexless navy suits, and bulging briefcases. Of the 3,000 girls surveyed, only 9 percent expressed any interest in a business career. And one created a collage featuring female superachievers with their faces blacked out. "When we asked why," says a study coauthor, Fiona Wilson, "she said, `Well, you lose your identity.' "
Stunned by those perceptions, the Committee of 200 has launched a teen mentoring campaign through the Girl Scouts, offering college scholarships and pins as rewards for innovative business plans. And other organizations are puzzling over how to bridge an attitudinal chasm that could make the current corporate generation gap look like a hairline crack.
But Wilson warns that working women who want their daughters to follow in their footsteps need to reconsider the messages they're bringing home. "What struck us is that girls care more about helping people in their careers than boys," she says. "Now we have to convince them business can be a way of doing that."
This story appears in the November 3, 2003 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.