Giving and guiding: mentorship for women
Lilith Professional mentors women in the legal, finance and engineering professions
Finding a healthy worklife balance is difficult for anyone. But it can be particularly hard for women with fast-paced, higher-stress jobs in such professional fields as law, accounting, finance and engineering.
The desire to raise a family can often conflict with climbing the corporate ladder, forcing many women to abandon potentially rewarding careers.
After witnessing a substantial number of women leaving Calgary law firms four years ago, Ronnalee Mcmahon decided something needed to be done to stem the attrition.
“We were seeing a mass exodus of female lawyers at the five-year mark, which is an inherently challenging time for female lawyers and their employers,” says the founder of Lilith Professional, a locally based mentorship program that matches bright, talented professional women with successful business leaders proficient in their field.
“It’s a time when women feel that they need to make a choice between partnership and parenthood, and a time when the average cost of losing a senior associate to a law firm is $315,000,” says Mcmahon.
Reports generated by the Law Society of Upper Canada and Canadian Bar Association found women who have been mentored tend to stay within the field, and those who left cited a lack of access to mentoring as a major reason for their departures.
Mcmahon, a former paralegal and certified mediator, felt these women would have been more willing and able to overcome career obstacles had they the support and mentorship of someone who had been in their shoes. The Lilith program includes a two-day retreat, one-on-one mentoring, and a variety of networking and professional development events over the course of a year, with the protege’s employer generally paying the program’s $10,000 fee.
More than 100 mentor and protege pairs have taken part in the development program, and Mcmahon says almost every participant has told her it has improved their ability to deal with challenging situations and people with different personalities.
“We’re playing in the diversity pool,” Mcmahon says. “So the more women we attract and retain in business translates to more business success. We’ve seen the research on the strong correlation between the share of top female managers and return on assets and equity.”
U.S. research organization Mckinsey & Company revealed in a recent study that women in executive and managerial roles corresponded to stronger financial performances and staff motivation. In fact, the effect on a company’s bottom line can be as high as 27 per cent.
“When we saw that 64 per cent of women professionals find the absence of a female role model as a barrier to their development, it tells you we need to do more of it,” Mcmahon says.
Katie Clayton, a barrister and solicitor with Farken Martineau Dumoulin LLP, was keen to sign up as a mentor, as she also noticed the dwindling number of women staying in the legal profession.
“More than half my class was female,” she recalls. “If you look at my class 11 years later and see how many women have stayed at firms or have walked that partnership track, for us there seems to be a big fall-off.” For Clayton, mentoring has been a great way to encourage legal associates to work toward becoming a partner.
“I think it’s important for those associates to see individuals who have taken that path and be able to talk to them about how they got there and why they chose that path and did they consider other paths?” she explains. “It’s good to have a recourse to an information source, someone who has walked that course before and can give you information about what their experience was like and perhaps pass on some tips.”
As with law, the traditionally male-centric engineering field has had a tough time retaining female employees. While women make up about 20 per cent of engineering students, the number who go on to executive positions is much lower.
Judy Fairburn, executive vice-president, environment and strategic planning for Cenovus Energy, credits positive mentorship throughout her career for her success.
“The road to one’s career is not always smooth sailing,” she says. “They (her mentors) believed in my potential. They were core to building my confidence, particularly when you encounter some difficult situations.”
Shell Canada production engineer Colleen Lenahan, who has been Fairburn’s protege for the past six months, says the mentoring program has helped her clarify career goals.
“I was questioning if I wanted to stay in my role or move into another role, or did I want to do something different?” she explains.
“What I really liked and what I took away from the mentoring relationship and our discussions is that it made me focus on what I like about what I’m doing now, what sort of things I would like to do and how am I going to get to that spot.
“Personally, it’s kind of nice to be focused. It’s given me more confidence in myself.”
It’s not only the protege who benefits from mentoring. Mentors often find themselves re-examining their own goals and career strategies during the process.
“The discussions we’ve had have been helpful to me,” says Fairburn, explaining her monthly meet-ups with Lenahan have allowed her to refresh her own brand.
“In both cases, it helps guide you on how you can curate opportunities for yourself going forward. A great mentoring relationship is one in which both people learn. I know I’ve learned a lot as well through the dialogue with Colleen.”