Important as it is, sometimes mentorship isn't enough.

As the Chair of TD's largest enterprise resource group (ERG), Women at TD, I'm fortunate to work with dedicated women and allies within TD to help remove barriers to our women colleagues' success. As we continue to sharpen our focus on tangible ways to advance career progression for women, we've recently been talking a lot about mentorship.

Mentorship is a fascinating topic for me because I've benefitted so much both from working with my own mentors and from what I've learned as a mentor to other colleagues. But recently we were inspired to dig a little deeper, and to try and learn more about how Canadian women are feeling about their ability to access mentorship programs, and where the gaps might be.

The results were fascinating, and quite frankly represent a call to action for all of us as leaders and employers. While formal mentorship programs work, some women still don't have access, and it's clear that as employers we need to do more to make it easier for women to access these formal programs during the work day.

To uncover these results, Women at TD worked with Catalyst Canada to commission a survey of more than 1,500 Canadians working in office and professional settings. We asked them about their access to mentorship programs of all types (1:1, peer mentoring, group mentoring, and more), what they expected to get out of those programs and experiences, and—for those with mentors today—how reality stacked up against those expectations.

It's clear from the responses that mentorship programs work. They are helping to level the playing field for women colleagues seeking advancement by helping them level up, and more businesses should invest in them and create capacity for employees to participate both as mentors and mentees.

But we can't stop with mentorship. Programs need to evolve to provide sponsorship opportunities and ensure mentors are acting as advocates to help their mentees achieve tangible career advancement.

Work to be done to close the gap on access to mentorship

We found that three quarters (76%) of the women who participated in the survey do have access to mentoring opportunities through formal programs. But that leaves around a quarter (24%) of the surveyed women working for employers who don't currently offer these programs.

Julie Cafley, Catalyst Canada's CEO, recently co-authored an op-ed piece with me on why these formal programs are critical drivers of development and equity for working women. Our survey has confirmed that assertion—nearly all mentees in the survey group described their mentors as helping them achieve the things they wish to achieve at work, with more than 9 in 10 saying their mentor is doing very well or fairly well (93%) in this regard.

More than half of the women we surveyed who don't have a mentor today (55%) say they would take part in formal mentorship if it was available. Our findings can be taken as a real call to action for more employers to seriously consider investing in mentorship programs, especially for equity seeking groups, including women. The development opportunity they provide helps employers retain top talent and builds skills that result in positive business outcomes, too.

Offering programs is not enough, though; it is equally important to structure work to allow employees to take advantage of them. In the study, women working in office or professional settings were equally likely (45%) to say they would not take part, even if formal mentorship was offered through their employer, and the main reason (26%) was lack of time during their working hours. It is imperative that employers who want to develop and retain talent consider not only offering these programs, but also creating opportunities during the workday for their employees to take advantage of them.

Differences in perceived benefits of mentorship

So, in what specific ways are mentorship arrangements driving value for mentees, and how successful are they perceived to be by mentees?

Our study found that among the surveyed women who have a mentor, nearly 9 in 10 say their mentor is doing very well or fairly well in helping them identify and build new skills (89%), deal with challenges in the workplace (89%), and build confidence (88%).

That's great news, because women in our survey placed a lot of emphasis on the importance of these "personal and professional improvement" types of outcomes for mentorship arrangements. Compared to their male counterparts, women more highly ranked the importance of the mentor's role in building their confidence (86% women vs 82% men), helping them deal with challenges they are facing in the workplace (89% women vs 84% men), and navigating their organization (85% vs 81% men).

Conversely, men and women are at relative parity in valuing the role of mentors in advocating for their advancement. They rank the importance of a mentor's help in working toward promotion equally (both 76%) and as well as helping them expand their professional network (both 81%)—mentorship attributes commonly described as sponsorship.

When measuring expectation against reality, the gender divide reappears. When we asked about respondents' satisfaction with their current mentors' sponsorship activities, 73% of women respondents say their mentor is doing very well or fairly well at helping them work towards a promotion, whereas 81% of men reported the same. 82% of women ranked their mentors as doing very well or fairly well at helping them connect them to opportunities within their organizations, whereas 87% of men felt the same.

That gap in the perceived effectiveness of mentorship at advancing career growth is troubling. But it's also interesting to me that while men and women in our survey seek out and value sponsorship equally, as I noted above, women respondents are more likely to see the value of mentorship through a lens of personal development and skills-building than men are.

I think as leaders within women-focused ERGs, there's an opportunity for us to seek out confirmation as to whether survey results like these resonate with women colleagues in our organizations. If they do, we should begin to understand the underlying reasons not only for the results gap but the difference in expectations. We can use data like this to begin open discussions—even uncomfortable ones. Is a confidence gap at play? Are women inherently oriented to prioritize skills development, or are we socialized to believe that the way to drive advancement in our career journeys is to address perceived deficiencies within ourselves?

From mentorship to sponsorship: the way forward

Returning to the question of the perceived effectiveness of mentors at setting mentees up for the next steps in their careers, there's also an interesting finding that doesn't relate to gender difference. We asked respondents to rank how well their mentors are doing at helping them work toward a promotion. 88% of men and women who say that in addition to a mentor they also have a formal sponsor (i.e., someone who uses their influence or leadership status to advocate for an employee) reported that their mentors are doing very well or fairly well at it. Only 73% of respondents without sponsors report that their mentors are doing "very well/fairly well" at accelerating promotability. It appears having a sponsor can actually be perceived to boost the value of a mentor.

The lift sponsorship provides to mentees is even more dramatic if we focus more narrowly on mentees who assessed their mentor as performing "very well." Only 43% of men and women without sponsors felt their mentors were doing "very well" at helping them achieve the things they want to achieve at work (including all options in the survey for specific benefits of mentorship). But among respondents who have formal sponsors, that percentage choosing "very well" to describe their mentors' performance in helping them reach their goals overall jumps to 72%.

Unfortunately, our study reflects that formal sponsorship is rare in the workplace, particularly for women: seven in ten (71%) women say they have never had a sponsor at work (vs 62% of men). This is an urgent call to action to leaders to advocate for increased sponsorship of top talent.

There is a clear opportunity for employers of both men and women to build sponsorship into mentorship programs as a formal component, provide training in sponsorship for mentors and hold them accountable for their efforts. In our op-ed piece, Julie Cafley and I offered a suggested model for programming that blends both the access to training and dedicated 1:1 mentor pairing typical of mentorship programs with the accountability for action and advocacy that characterizes sponsorship. This includes things like dedicated cross-business unit talent calibration sessions to discuss and facilitate the movement of the mentees (lateral and upward), and a commitment from mentors in the program to take specific actions including expanding their mentee's network, getting them visibility, opening up career opportunities.

I see tremendous reason for optimism in our survey, but also motivation to do more. Mentorship programs are a great first step for women colleagues seeking advancement and should be more available—and accommodated in employees' working lives (hybrid work models help in this regard, the data shows). Our businesses benefit from these programs in terms of retention, but also in tapping into diverse voices to power innovation. But we can't stop there. To drive greater equity, we need to evolve how we structure these programs to put greater emphasis on opportunity to drive sponsorship.

Footnote:

Ipsos poll conducted between August 9 and 26, 2024, on behalf of TD. For this survey, a sample of 2,453 working Canadians aged 18+ was interviewed, including 1579 people working in office/professional settings, and 935 women in office/professional settings.

Quotas and weighting were employed to ensure that the sample’s composition reflects that of the Canadian population according to census parameters. The precision of Ipsos online polls is measured using a credibility interval. In this case, the poll is accurate to within ± 2.3 percentage points among working Canadians, ± 2.8 percentage points among Canadians working in office/professional settings, and ±3.7 percentage points among women in office/professional settings, 19 times out of 20, had all Canadians aged 18+ in these groups been polled. The credibility interval will be wider among subsets of the population. All sample surveys and polls may be subject to other sources of error, including, but not limited to coverage error, and measurement error.