By Claudia Deane
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, March 23, 1998; Page A8

Robert Cordero, 49, a counselor at a drug rehabilitation clinic in Albany, N.Y., relies on his female supervisor for advice about work and career. But it wasn't always that way.

"I couldn't see myself four or five years ago bringing this to a woman, period," he said. "I'm from the old school. ... You know, men are men, and we don't need to be asking the women. But I've gotten past that. She's helped me with that."

Now Cordero can't say enough good about his boss and mentor. He calls her a guiding light and says that without her, "I probably wouldn't be where I'm at professionally."

As the gender balance in workplaces shifts, men with traditional ideas about gender roles find themselves relying on guidance from senior women. At the same time, young women searching for a female mentor find only men at the top of many professions. Add the anxiety many workers feel from an increased focus on sexual harassment, and it becomes clear why finding a mentor – even in an era in which workplaces are setting up formal mentoring programs – can be a tricky business, according to results of surveys done by The Washington Post, the Kaiser Family Foundation and Harvard University, and interviews.

Slightly fewer than half of men and women in the survey reported having a senior person at work who helped them get ahead. Of those, the vast majority of men had been helped by a man, and a majority of women reported having a female mentor. Women in professional or managerial jobs were more likely to have a man as mentor.

For many years, mentoring has happened "naturally, without any influence from us, between people who have things in common," said Ted Childs, vice president for global work force diversity at IBM, which has run a mentoring program for more than 20 years. "But generally the beneficiaries have been white men, because they were in the senior positions, and they would mentor people who came along with whom they had things in common," usually younger white men.

"To maximize mentoring, you have to maximize the facility of people to mentor people not like them," Childs said.

Having a mentor "is important for everybody, but it's probably even more important for women," said Debra Meyerson, who studies gender and work at the Institute for Research on Women and Gender at Stanford University. "Mentoring is sort of a formalized way of developing informal relationships that men have had access to without thinking about it," in ways as basic as going to the same bathroom as the boss.

Rhonda Meyer 36, is a retail supervisor in Virginia, Minn., and mentor to several very young women in her store. "I think they feel more comfortable talking to another woman, maybe less intimidated," she said.

Judith Mueller, executive director of the Women's Center in Vienna and founder of its Information and Career Advisory Network, which matches women with professional mentors, also believes there is "a comfort zone" between women and their female mentors.

The ease may spring from a sense that they face the same demands. Mueller says women look to those who successfully balance work and home and think, " 'Oh my gosh, she's doing this. She has three children, she's managed three pregnancies, she's managed to retain a marriage, she's managed to be involved in elder care, and despite the level of her employment and responsibility, she seems to be walking around quite sane,' " Mueller said.

"You'd never have those thoughts if you were talking to a man, because that's not the male experience," Mueller added. The successful woman becomes a model for a colleague who wants to "find out more about the education, the management, the training that has made all this come together for her."

Having a mentor becomes particularly important at senior levels, where men and women confront more subjective standards for advancement or a "gut feel" test, said Meyerson, the Stanford scholar.

Four in 10 respondents to the Post survey said a lack of mentoring is a major reason why women face a glass ceiling on promotions, and more than one-third called it a minor reason.

One obstacle to male-female mentoring may be the focus on sexual harassment, though the extent of the problem is unclear. More than 40 percent of working men and women in the survey said that attention to the issue had made no difference in their mentoring behavior, but 36 percent said it had become harder to give career help to someone of the opposite sex, and nearly 1 in 4 reported that they had at least occasionally avoided mentoring someone for this reason.

Larry LaClair, 57, of Key West, Fla., says the focus on sexual harassment drastically changed his willingness to mentor women in his former job as a security manager. For a time, "I simply didn't deal with females unless it was in a situation where lots of other people happened to be around," he said.

LaClair said that his withdrawal from professional relationships with women was subconscious and that he was prompted to change by a confrontation with a woman who had noticed his reticence.

"As I've gotten older, I said: 'This is stupid. I'm going to take my risks. I want to help somebody to grow.' "