Mentoring-in-a-Box: Technical Women at Work

Growing Technical Leaders
Technical women face challenges, from institutionalized bias to differences in communication styles to a lack of female role models. Developed in collaboration with the Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology, Mentoring-in-a-Box: Technical Women at Work helps women excel in the technical professions and advance to positions of leadership.

Mentoring-in-a-Box: Technical Women at Work will help you start and sustain a purposeful and rewarding mentoring relationship. Informed by research from academic and business literature and by conversations with mentoring experts in the field, Mentoring-in-a-Box: Technical Women at Work offers activities, resources, and tools to support a mentoring pair, presented in an easy-to-use format.

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Mentoring-in-a-Box: Technical Women at Work includes the following components:

Mentoring-at-a-Glance
This informational piece introduces the purpose and benefits of mentoring technical women, and describes the Mentoring-in-a-Box: Technical Women at Work resource. Read this piece for an overview and distribute it to others.

Mentoring Practical Guide
The Practical Guide directs your use of the Mentoring-in-a-Box components as you follow a sequence of mentoring activities.

Mentoring Basics - A Mentor's Guide
Learn about mentoring and the qualities and activities of a mentor. Learn why technical women need mentors, and how to find a promising protégée. Find out how you, the mentor, benefit from the mentoring relationship.

Mentoring Basics: A Protegee's Guide
Give this guide to someone you know who might benefit from mentoring. It will help her understand why women need mentors, how she can benefit from a mentoring relationship, and ways to identify and engage the mentor who can help her the most.

Set-the-Stage Template
Use the Set-the-Stage Template to get your relationship off on the right foot. It will guide you as you establish primary expectations and set initial goals and ground rules for your mentoring relationship. After it is complete, be sure you each keep a copy.

Meeting Plan Template
Use the Meeting Plan Template to plan your sessions and record your progress. This template prompts you to build agendas and helps guide your activities toward your ultimate goals.

Activities Guide
Broken into four themes, the Activities Guide addresses issues technical women face in the workplace and offers targeted activities that reflect best practices in career advancement and mentoring.

Sources and References
Examine the sources and references that inform this Box to learn more about issues of the workplace, research on organizational behavior, and best practices in mentoring technical women.

Mentoring-in-a-Box: Technical Women at Work was produced with the Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology.  We also thank the following people for their contributions to these materials: Joanne M. Cohoon, University of Virginia and NCWIT; Kellee Noonan, Hewlett Packard; Caroline Simard and Cindy Goral, Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology; and Jane Krauss, Education Consultant.

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