How can mentoring support women for senior roles in engineering careers? Sally Twisleton and Paul Stokes report
Can coaching and mentoring help create a better gender balance within senior leadership in engineering? This was the question posed by Sally Twisleton in her dissertation research for her MSc in Coaching and Mentoring at Sheffield Hallam University.
One of this article’s authors’ (Twisleton) background as an engineering leader at Rolls-Royce and her personal interest in coaching and mentoring sparked the research initiative:
“Although things are changing, throughout my career I haven’t seen many senior women engineers and that can send signals out like ‘is this job really an option for someone like me?’ It’s a complex challenge with many contributing factors but I was interested to see how coaching and mentoring may play a role in supporting more women to get to the top.”
It’s been well-documented that engineering is staffed mainly by men. Not-for-profit organisation, EngineeringUK, which seeks to inspire people at all levels to pursue careers in engineering and technology, reported in 2021 that just 14.5% of those working in engineering were female, compared with 47% of the overall UK workforce (EngineeringUK, 2021).
Furthermore, a gender pay study from the Royal Academy of Engineering (Wollaston et al, 2019) suggested that women made up just 8% of the upper quartile of salary range. It attributed the gender pay gap for engineers as due largely to under-representation of women in more senior and higher paid roles.
An earlier study by McKinsey (Hunt et al, 2016) estimated that bridging the UK gender gap in work has the potential to add £150 billion to the UK economy by 2025, including by paving the way for more women to work in high productivity sectors like Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths (STEM).
Francke (2019) identifies five benefits of gender balance:
- Boosts financial performance globally
- Increases ability to attract and retain talent
- Enhances employee engagement, culture and trust
- Brings firms closer to customers and boosts brand
- Drives better innovation, team decisions, raises ethics and reduces risk.
In terms of women in leadership roles, Offerman and Foley (2020) carried out a detailed study into the literature on the advantage of women in leadership. Benefits included:
- Making the workplace more gender equitable at all levels
- Providing a unique contribution in terms of personality and leadership style
- Women having a tendency to be more collaborative than competitive which drives better team work, performance and productivity
- Women being more likely to make ethics decisions and prize ethics
- Women may be better at leading and communicating in a virtual world due to a more positive attitude to technology compared to men.
While there are clear benefits to having more women in senior roles, their under-presentation is a multifaceted problem and complex to resolve.
There are three main challenges: low percentage of women coming into engineering (17.6%), difficulty retaining women in engineering (up to 50% leave), and challenges with making it to the top among those who stay.
Twisleton’s research examined the role that coaching and mentoring initiatives can play in overcoming these challenges. She conducted in-depth interviews with nine female engineers in the ‘top jobs’ across the industry (chief engineer, chief technology officer, vice president, engineering director) and a series of focus groups with developing engineers within Rolls-Royce. She analysed this data and developed a layered model of coaching & mentoring (see Figure 1).
Figure 1: The layered model of mentoring for women in engineering
The role of mentoring
All the women told stories of how mentoring had played a role in their career, and spoke fondly of the (mostly men) who’d helped them along the way. They talked about the importance of feeling like they ‘belonged’ which they achieved by establishing technical credibility and using role models for inspiration. They pointed to the importance of empathic mentors and a supportive peer community.
It was seen as critical that they were challenged and encouraged to recognise their talents and to be able to progress. Central to this was the importance of feedback both through mentoring but also through the line manager relationship.
It was acknowledged by those in the most senior positions that, in order to ‘get the big jobs’ they needed to be actively sponsored. There was also a strong theme around the active support for new and returning mothers to help them navigate that challenging experience alongside a career.
In addition, it was also vital to recognise that women still tended to shoulder traditional responsibilities for caring for older relatives and that this placed a premium on flexibility for these aspirant women. Factoring all of these elements together, there was a clear need to develop inclusive leaders who were empathic and could create psychological safety for their teams to be themselves. The model (Figure 1) that Twisleton developed is an attempt to map what this should look like.
The model starts with a foundation of inclusive leadership to support an environment that fosters inclusion and creates a sense of belonging. This is at the base of the model as it’s so critical to everything else. The way leaders behave shapes the organisation and helping the male majority to create a welcoming space for all is very important because without this the rest of the model and actions fall down.
The next step is having line manager as coach capability to support the development of the women in role. In both the literature and interviews this was seen as a critical relationship. The line manager acting as champion, feedback giver and encourager to stretch and develop employees was very important. The research suggested work is needed to develop both these parts of the model in industry. Coaching (individual, group or team) could provide a mechanism to drive changes.
The next layer up is specific, tailored mentoring support for women with caring responsibilities, either for those taking time out to raise children or those with other caring responsibilities. This slice runs the length of the women’s career because of the range in age when a women may choose to have a child and the fact that more women are caring for elderly relatives than men.
The research suggested that different sorts of support would be helpful at different stages:
- Early career
Role models and technical mentoring were seen as important here - Mid career
Support and counsel, challenge and encouragement was seen as important at this stage - Later career
Here, sponsorship is important to increase the chance of getting top jobs
This staged approach to mentoring mirrors the Merrick and Stokes (2021) model of supervision in mentoring which matches up the supervision need with the stage of development of the mentor. The timely nature of the support was important to the women featured in the study.
Recommendations
The research provided the basis of a number of recommendations for different stakeholders within coaching and mentoring, ie, individuals, in organisations and for cross-industry bodies. These included:
- The women themselves taking a strong role in managing their careers, asking for what they need and seeking help
- Peers and leaders being allies and advocates and senior women stepping forward as visible active role models
- Senior leaders actively sponsoring women
- Organisations addressing the issues of maternity support, line manager upskilling for coaching and leadership inclusion
- The wider industry bodies supporting this by cross-industry efforts – promoting role models, enabling mentoring, supporting technical development and possibly offering coaching professionals who understand the industry.
The model in Figure 1 is not offered as ‘the truth’ but simply a frame for exploring mentoring and coaching interventions directed at the development of senior women leaders.
Figure 1: The layered model of mentoring for women in engineering
Twisleton reflects: “Doing this research has been very interesting. It was noticeable that simply listening to the women’s stories was inspiring – I had not realised that these role models and shared stories were so important to making me feel included until I started interviewing the women.”
Key takeaway
This research shows that coaching and mentoring initiatives cannot be a ‘one size fits all approach’ – different types of mentoring or coaching support may be needed at different times. A woman may choose to have several mentors and coaches over the course of her career for very different purposes. This poses the question of how we ensure there are really high-quality mentors within industry to support their development in the way we have started to do with coaching. There’s still a lot of work to do to drive a better gender balance, but hopefully this model can play a small part in creating an environment where more women can make it to the top.
About the authors
- Sally Twisleton is skills and capability lead at Rolls-Royce Plc
- Dr Paul Stokes is associate professor of coaching & mentoring at Sheffield Hallam University, UK
References
- EngineeringUK, Gender Disparity in Engineering, EngineeringUK, 2021: https://www.engineeringuk.com/research/briefings/gender-disparity-in-engineering/
- A Francke, Create a Gender-balanced Workplace (Penguin Business Experts Series), Penguin Random House UK, 2019
- V Hunt, R Dobbs, E Gibbs, A Madgavkar, J Woetzel, S Arora, W Hong, M Krishnan, R Arora, C Barnett, and C Brookhouse, The Power of Parity: Advancing women’s equality in the United Kingdom, McKinsey Global Institute, 2016
- L Merrick and P Stokes, ‘Supervision in mentoring programmes’, in T Bachkirova, P Jackson and D Clutterbuck (eds.), Coaching and Mentoring Supervision: Theory and Practice, McGraw-Hill Open University Press, 2021
- L Offerman and K Foley, ‘Is there a female leadership advantage?’, in Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Business and Management, Oxford University Press, 2020
- H Wollaston, J Hanna, S Howse, V Peakman, and I Woudstra, Closing the Engineering Gender Pay Gap, Royal Academy of Engineering and Women in Science and EngineeringUK, 2019