Hi all,

I wouldn't want to crowd out women who are looking for this sort of
mentoring, but I (and other men) might be interested in being a mentee[1].
The flip side of MJ's logic (which I agree with) is that no men in the
pool of mentees means fewer opportunities for women to be mentors.

Just my two cents.
Joe Montibello, MLIS
Library Systems Manager
Dartmouth College Library
603.646.9394
[log in to unmask]

[1] dumb aside on the word mentee - from Wikipedia, "The person in receipt
of mentorship may be referred to as a protégé (male), a protégée (female),
an apprentice or, in recent years, a mentee." Protégé(é) appeals to me
more than mentee, but maybe that's because my brain jumps from mentee to
mentees to Mentos. I don't want to volunteer to be dropped into a bottle
of soda! Also, I don't have enough linguistics/language history to know if
protégée is a female derivative of the male form, which would probably be
undesirable.

On 12/7/12 8:52 AM, "MJ Ray" <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

>Shaun Ellis <[log in to unmask]>
>> Hi Rosalyn,
>> I agree that we should encourage women to step up and mentor other
>>women 
>> at Code4Lib.  I also see the pairing of women mentors with women
>>mentees 
>> as fitting into an overall mentorship program, and I would be
>>interested 
>> in collaborating with you and others to help frame it out.
>
>I think pairing would need to be done pretty carefully and I'm not
>sure that only pairing women with women, for example, would be a good
>thing.
>
>Even ignoring my belief that it would be sexist, it could cause
>practical problems by creating a feedback loop: fewer women in the
>community probably means fewer women mentors available for women
>learners, leading to slower promotion of women into the community.
>
>Hope that explains,
>-- 
>MJ Ray (slef), member of www.software.coop, a for-more-than-profit co-op.
>http://koha-community.org supporter, web and library systems developer.
>In My Opinion Only: see http://mjr.towers.org.uk/email.html
>Available for hire (including development) at http://www.software.coop/