Studies show that mentorship is an important part of career mobility and longevity in business in general, but that women face more barriers than men in finding a mentor due to a lack of women in upper-level management and the belief that there is too little common ground between men and women in the field to make cross-gender mentor-protégé relationships work. This mentoring problem is compounded in the technology industry since there are so few women in upper management. I found that relationships that might have been characterized as “networking” or “mentoring” between men were sexualized if one member of the dyad was female.

Alice E. Marwick, Status Update, loc. 698