Allen and Eby considered sex and re...

Allen and Eby considered sex and relational characteristics in mentoring effectiveness and establish that male mentors reported providing more career mentoring than female mentors who reported providing more psychological mentoring. In addition, mentors in informal mentorships provided no more mentoring than did mentors in formal mentorships. In another investigation Allen, Day, and Lentz researched interpersonal comfort as a mediating factor in mentoring relationships and construct that although interpersonal comfort mediated neither formal nor informal relationship archetypes informal mentoring and interpersonal comfort were positively associated with career mentoring.

Among the greatest in number meaningful articles published in 2004 was a multicultural feminist gauge of mentoring presented by Benishek, Bieschke, Park, and Slattery. The authors moveed that although both mentor and mentee await a mutually rewarding relationship that is delivered of conflict and difficulty, misperceptions about the meaning and proces of mentoring abound. A often met with criticism is the absence of a consistent definition across the mentoring literature that perpetuates a simplistic rather than a factual and tangled picture of mentoring. Thus the perpetuation of erroneous information will continue to affect mentoring efficacy. Benishek et al. acknowledged that the majority of research literature upon mentoring is positive; however, a substantial portion intimates that the mentoring experience is not always positive. The authors reviewed existing prototypes and suggested that traditional originals fail to fully address the mentoring povertys of people of color and other marginalized population They revised Fassinger's (1997) feminist archetype of mentoring to reflect a more multicultural approach to mentoring by way of eliminating "commitment to diversity" as a separate dimension and according to clarifying instead what is in the Fassinger mould and by infusing into it relevant multicultural issues from the mentoring literature. The revised mould thus "includes an explicit evaluation of power and privilege, that is, the benefit of unearned assets within the environment and within the relationship" (Benishek et al., p 436) Differences between mentor and mentee are to be valued and explored rather than ignored, and the responsibility for an render free of access dialogue rests with the mentor.