The Older Woman as Sage: The Satisfaction of Mentoring

Abstract

Mentoring is important to the personal and professional lives of many developing professionals, but it is also beneficial in numerous ways to the mentor. This article focuses on the benefits of mentoring from the mentor's prospective, including satisfaction in seeing protégées succeed and empowerment of both the mentor and protégée. This article showcases the importance of being a mentor, the impact mentoring has on developing psychologists, and how mentoring sustains older women's connections and contributions to their field. The authors discuss what mentoring is, what mentors do, how to become a mentor, and the benefits of being a mentor. How one becomes a mentor in various work settings including academia is also discussed, as are concerns regarding inappropriate mentoring relationships and how to improve the quality of the mentoring relationship. The authors suggest that becoming a mentor can be empowering for women clients as well as therapists.

KEYWORDS:

• academia
• aging
• feminist therapy
• mentoring
• protégée
• wisdom

Notes

An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Symposium on Women, Power, & Aging at Pace University in New York City, September 2010.