Mentoring as Support for Women in Higher Education Leadership

In this chapter, we build on our previous work on the transition of women to leadership in higher education in Canada (Carter & Janes, 2018). Based on a review of the leadership development (LD) and mentorship literature and informal conversations with female colleagues at Canadian universities who provided permission to have their experiences shared in this chapter, we consider the role of mentorship in this professional progression. The chapter is a response to a movement which encourages women to mentor women (Carter & Janes, 2018) and, given the limited representation of women in leadership in higher education today which Block and Tietjen-Smith (2016) associate with a “lack of purposeful mentoring by same-gender role models,” this informal “conversation about leadership, mentorship, and women in higher education is timely” (p. 306).