Pred kratkim sem ponovno prebrala članek What does sponsorship look like?. Govori predvsem v tem, kakšna je razlika med mentoriranjem in sponzoriranjem ljudi.
Sama pri sebi opazujem, da sem še vedno slaba v dejanskem sponzoriranjem ljudi. Ne vem zakaj, mogoče nisem pretirano dobra v tem, da prep…
In my opinion, being the only woman in your org and staying there and existing there and advocating for yourself is already a huge militant step. I also don’t think there is a responsibility for women to sponsor other women, specifically – anyone can and should sponsor women (and people of other minorities, of course). Putting this extra burden on women only seems counter-productive.
I feel like some people are good mentors, some people are good sponsors, and some people are just not really cut for it. All three are valuable, and the groups overlap, too. There are so many ways to make a difference that if sponsoring a woman just isn’t working for you, then you can do something else – like write a blog post about how sponsoring women is important, in case a sponsor-type person stumbles on your blog and gets inspired! 🙂
In reply to a post reply to sara on sponsoring women.
Thank you for your kind words.
I think I was mostly trying to work through my feeling of why I feel like I should be doing it, but I am not doing it.
Because some of the things are easy – being the only woman in the tech meetups, well, I have been doing this without noticing, until I had the classmate I brought in started asking me, if we will be the only women again. At that point I realised, that a lot of times I was the only one, and did not notice?
Also, I like public speaking and I am not really hiding something, which can lead to some… unexpected results.
Ask me to go on the stage on the tech conference and make a point, which involves my asexuality? That is easy and I had done it before – even caused somebody else to cause a code of conduct breach.
Making sure my work is done in a way, that it suits me? I think here I am also lucky, I have a great team lead, but I also managed to arrange this.
But the whole mentorship thing? Actually the whole helping people find other opportunities and pairing them with the right people? That one is completely indiscernible to me. How to people even do this? It seems like this magic skill, that I watch and am in awe of it, but have no idea even how to attempt this.
As you said, no everybody is suited for every work. And in some aspects, I already live this. But when it comes to this – I guess I will still need something (maybe time?) to not just know, that I don’t need to do this, but also feel it.
But thanks for giving me to push to clarify this to myself. 🙂