In business and in life, the power of mentorship has long been understood, but how important is it that your mentor look like you? This question was at the center of a new study which specifically found that mentor gender has a powerful impact on female entrepreneurs.
More to the point, in a randomized controlled experiment, researchers found that when a female entrepreneur is guided by a female mentor, her sales increased by an average of 32 percent.
The study is published in the INFORMS journal Marketing Science. The peer-reviewed article is called “Breaking the Glass Ceiling: Empowering Female Entrepreneurs Through Female Mentors.” The authors of the study are from the University of Notre Dame, Texas A&M University, the University of Chicago, and the London School of Economics and Political Science.
To conduct their research, the study authors conducted a randomized controlled field experiment with 930 Ugandan entrepreneurs.
“The participants in our study operated from a physical building and were part of a business support program,” said the authors. “We conducted one-on-one interviews with the participants between July and August 2015, and we also conducted a business audit and baseline survey the same year.”
The researchers said that 40 percent of the entrepreneurs were female, and 54 percent were married. The typical entrepreneur was 31 years old, had two children, and had completed high school or higher education.
“At baseline, the entrepreneurs’ firms, on average, were in operation for about four years and employed a very small staff,” said the authors. “Participants were randomly assigned to a Control (i.e., Comparison) group or a Treatment group. Those in the Treatment group were then randomly matched with a unique mentor.”
“The mentors had a post-graduate degree and at least 5 years of work experience and were located in various parts of the world,” they added.
The researchers conducted follow-up business audits and surveys in May 2017. What they found was female entrepreneurs do in fact benefit more from female mentors because the female mentor-female mentee arrangement was said to involve more positive and supportive engagement.
Generally, the researchers found that while the female-to-female mentorship dynamic yielded promising results, female entrepreneurs who were guided by male mentors did not significantly improve their performance relative to those in the Comparison group.
“In the end, we found that to increase the likelihood of female entrepreneurship success, gender matching with female entrepreneurs is a promising strategy,” said the authors. “Just as importantly, in cases where female mentors may not be available, male mentors could be more effective by adopting a style characterized by more positive engagement which is akin to female mentors.”
