Mentoring in Science. a Difficult Experiment

Three of my most talented female graduate students have not ended up in those academic appointments where they were predestined to be at the beginning of their graduate studies: stars of our profession. My daughter, your colleague and a wife of graduate student, who was much smarter than her husband, still he became a star and she is just a lecturer in a small liberal arts college” said very self-reflectively a legendary senior professor evaluating his long career as a supervisor and promoter. This response was prompted by my question. I used the opportunity of meeting him to discuss one the issues I consider as a great challenge for senior academics: what do you do when you see more academic potential in a graduate student than the graduate herself? How can you stop yourself wanting her to realize her potential when that necessarily means a more difficult life for her? I think I dared to ask this question to him, who is only a couple of years older than my own mother because recently I started to think very critically about mentoring programs. Working as a professor in the more than twenty years I faced several times the dilemma how to make female graduates more ambitious and to armor them with all necessary skills to fight for their deserved (or at least I consider a deserved place for them) in the present structure of academia. In this article I am describing how the mentoring programs were discovered as one of the remedies for the “leaky pipeline” for women in academia and how I see structural problems with these programs but still a possible solution to avoid disappointment of the senior academics looking back at the end of their academic career on wasted female scientific talents under their supervision.