Female mentorship is the mentoring of women by women to further their career and development prospects. [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] A female mentor is sometimes called a femtor. [6]
The Rhodes Project, which examines the experience of female Rhodes Scholars, was created in 2004 by Ann Olivarius. [7] Rhodes Scholars are chosen from around the world for graduate study at the University of Oxford. The project showcases research on the lack of career-support networks, based on interviews and data from female Rhodes Scholars who were born in the 1950s to 1980s and who earned graduate and professional degrees until the early 2000s. [7] [8] The project is interested in how this data reflects the current situation of women. One interviewee told the researchers: "It would have been helpful to really know to what extent things still haven’t changed for women. ... How I would have handled situations might have been different if I had understood what was going on behind the scenes. The blatant examples are something that you deal with but it’s the subtle things and understanding those that I would have worked through differently." [9]