Career Moves: Mentoring for Women Advancing their Career and Leadership in Academia by Athena Vongalis-Macros (Ed.)

Abstract

Tracing its etymology to Greek mythology and the legend of Odysseus asking his old friend Mentor to take responsibility for guiding his son Telemachus while he was engaged in the Trojan War, the notion of mentoring emerged in the popular literature in the 1970s, coincident to the movement to advance women and minorities into positions of influence in almost every professional field. Ehrich and Hansford (1999) have suggested that two publications focused attention on the term and introduced it to the popular literature: The Seasons of a Man’s Life, by Levinson, Darrow, Klein, Levinson, and McKee (1978), and Men and Women of the Corporation, by Kanter (1977). Both cited mentoring as critical to advancement. Since that time, mentoring has become a veritable growth industry—in the lay and professional literature and in the research and writing in almost every discipline. Perusing the books available about mentoring from Amazon, one finds more than 1,000 currently available, and a search through Google yields more than 18 million results in response to the term “mentoring articles,” and almost 4 million in response to “research papers about mentoring.” Indeed, there is hardly a slice of people or business or professional group that has been excluded from the literature on mentoring, and while the literature on mentoring in academe is less voluminous, it is nonetheless robust. Into this profusion of written materials comes Athena Vongalis-Macros’ book, Career Moves: Mentoring for Women Advancing their Career and Leadership in Academia. It is a compilation of essays by “successful women currently working in higher education” (p. xiii). In the words of the editor, success is defined as having “achieved a level of career progress and. . .working at progressing to the next level” (p. xiii). According to the editor, the book is a continuation of discussions begun at an Oxford University conference, which brought together 40 women from a variety of countries and disciplines in higher education. The authors of the nine chapters in the book (excluding the introductory chapter) represent