“Mentoring: a tool for fostering gender diversity”

Mentoring represents a voluntary partnership in which a senior professional offers long-term support to a promising younger professional, passing on experience and know-how and providing access to his or her professional network.

DIAFORA has developed proven expertise in designing and implementing mentoring programs in support of each company’s gender diversity policy.

At several companies that use Diafora’s services, the program is now in its 5^th year, and all agree on the program’s benefits.

These mentoring programs can take a variety of forms: they can be internal or inter-company, they can be arranged through a network or as part of a corporate initiative, and they can include women and men at various stages of their careers:

• Informal : employees look for and choose their mentor
• Structured: in cooperation with Human Resources (e.g. mentoring targeting high potential employees, targeting women)
• Centralized or decentralized
• External : employees and students
• Mentoring between pairs
• Reverse mentoring
• Cross-company mentoring

Support provided by DIAFORA throughout the implementation of its mentoring programmes covers the following aspects:

• Defining terms and implementing the pilot
• Training the mentors and the mentees
• Creating programme aids and support materials (tools, mentoring guide, meeting between mentors and mentees…)
• Programme evaluation/assessment