By wlc
Published June 19, 2026
You sought out a mentor early.
Someone senior, someone accomplished, someone who had already navigated the rooms you were trying to enter. You listened carefully, took notes, and followed the roadmap.
Yet, something never quite fit.
The advice was good, the mentor was generous, but the guidance kept pointing toward a path that wasn’t quite yours. Maybe because yours is a different industry, you come from a different era, or hold a different kind of ambition.
This is the quiet frustration nobody talks about when we talk about mentorship, because we’ve been sold a myth. The idea that finding the right mentor, someone further along, higher up, further ahead, is the key to unlocking your potential.
It’s repeated so often that it has become career gospel. And the data seems to back it up.
83% of professionals who have had a mentor say mentorship has been influential in their career development, and 75% of executives credit their mentors with helping them reach their current position. (WNORTH)
So the logic holds.
Find a mentor. Follow their lead. Except it doesn’t always work that way for women.
63% of women report never having had a formal mentor. Yet 78% of women in senior roles have served as formal mentors themselves. (Women in Tech)
Women are giving what they never fully received. However, when they do get mentorship, there’s another problem.
Traditional mentorship was largely designed around a linear, hierarchical career model. One that assumed steady promotions, uninterrupted timelines, and a singular definition of success. A model built, mostly, around how men have historically moved through organizations.
Women’s careers rarely look like that.
They pivot. They pause. They rebuild. They lead from the side as often as from the top. They carry responsibilities that don’t show up on a CV.
When the mentorship framework doesn’t account for any of that, the advice, however well-intentioned, lands slightly off. It’s like being handed a map for someone else’s city.
What women actually need
Here’s what the research quietly points to – Women are significantly more likely than men to turn to colleagues for peer guidance, nearly twice as likely, in fact. (PubMed Central)
She knows what it feels like to negotiate a raise while being perceived as difficult. To be the only woman in a room and decide, in real time, how much space to take up. To have her confidence read as aggression and her hesitation read as weakness. To be asked “how do you manage it all?” in a way that’s never quite a compliment.
Research shows that support from employees at the same level can be just as effective as traditional mentorship. Sometimes more so, because it doesn’t require translating someone else’s experience into your own context. The context is already shared.
The difference between a mentor and a circle
A mentor gives you a ladder. A circle builds the ground beneath your feet.
That distinction matters enormously for women who are navigating leadership not just as a career milestone, but as an identity. Women who are figuring out what their ambition looks like on their own terms. Women who don’t need someone to tell them what to do, they need a room where they’re allowed to figure it out without judgment.
This is what WLC is built around.
Acknowledging that women need real, recurring, honest space to think alongside peers who are in it with them and not just mentors looking down.
Mentorship does matter. The right mentor at the right moment can change everything. But it is never meant to be the whole strategy.
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