Abstract:
Mentoring has become a popular form of staff development for women at Australian and New
Zealand universities, with a number now running some form of initiative. Improved access to
mentoring, it is argued, enhances the career prospects of women, and leads to an increase in the
number of women in senior positions. For this reason mentoring programmes are widely
supported by women in universities at all levels. However, despite the widespread introduction of
mentoring initiatives, and a substantial international literature on mentoring programmes and
benefits, the processes of mentoring are largely under-theorized.
In late 2002 the author interviewed 17 Australian women academics about their academic lives
and their experiences of mentoring. This paper draws on one of those interviews with 'Karen' to
investigate how academic women construct identities through mentoring. In her engagement with
discourses of academic careers and mentoring, Karen moves constantly between two key subject
positions-the position of the active subject, developing herself through mentoring as a suitable
academic subject for the times. The second is the position of one who is 'taken on board' and
acted upon by others through mentoring.
The author suggests that these two, on the face of it, contradictory subject positions sit
alongside one another in a theorization of mentoring. Further, these two elements are necessarily
present in mentoring, in that mentoring requires an active subject, whilst also embodying a desire
to be acted upon by others. Through the uptake and practices of mentoring, women academics
self-regulate to develop the appropriate attitudes and dispositions required of academics in
contemporary universities. This analysis has implications for how we understand mentoring for
the professional development of women academics, and its place as a vehicle for generating more
inclusive institutional cultures for women in universities.
