Challenging the gendered rhetoric of success? The limitations of women‐only mentoring for tackling gender inequality in the workplace
研究基于活动行业的女性专属导师项目，通过访谈导师和学员，发现这类项目虽能让性别问题在职场中显现，但未能挑战组织话语中隐藏的男性中心规范，反而可能强化女性有缺陷的刻板印象。
Mentoring is widely acknowledged to be an important contributor to women's career success and progression, but women often struggle to access mentoring networks that can help sponsor and develop their careers. Formal mentoring programmes designed specifically for women help overcome this challenge, but such schemes may at the same time reinforce masculine discourses which position women as deficient in relation to the invisibly male norm that is implicit within contemporary working practices. Drawing on a formal women‐only mentoring programme built on gender‐positive goals to empower women to ‘be the best they can be’ within the events industry, this article considers the extent to which such programmes can both challenge and reproduce gendered discourses of business and success. Interviews with mentors and mentees illustrate how such programmes make gender visible within business and individual careers, but masculinist underpinnings of organizational discourses remain invisible, unacknowledged and thus largely unchallenged.