White Male Mentors Boost Careers

Managers and other professionals whose career mentors are white males earn about $16,800 a year more than those guided up the corporate ladder by female or minority mentors, a study has found.

“Developing mentoring relationships seems to be related to salary attainment,” said George Dreher, professor of business administration at Indiana University in Bloomington and a co-author of the study. “Access to a white, male mentor is particularly important.”

“This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t pursue relationships with other mentors,” Dreher said. “You just don’t want to exclude white males.”

Despite gains achieved by women and minorities, white men remain in positions of power in many organizations, Dreher said.

“They have information and access to influential decision-makers that can enhance the career progress and development of their proteges. We see access to a white, male mentor as access to an influential network,” Dreher said.

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Mentoring in corporations or other business organizations has been defined as a developmental relationship between a protege and a more senior and influential executive.

With Taylor Cox, a professor of business administration at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Dreher surveyed 758 graduates from nine Master of Business Administration programs. The MBA graduates, all full-time company employees, had been in the work force an average of 10 years since completing their degrees.

The study probed several issues including whether minority MBAs have comparable access to white, male mentors and whether there was a difference in salary for those whose mentors were white males, Dreher said.

The 758 MBAs studied worked in marketing and sales, engineering and research, human resources, management information, general management and operations.

“A real clear pattern emerged that white, male MBAs were more likely to have a white, male mentor and the return associated with having one was significantly greater than the return associated with other mentoring relationships or no mentoring relationship at all,” Dreher said.

The MBAs whose career mentors were white males earned $16,800 more a year on average than those whose mentors were women or minorities.

MBAs who never established a mentoring relationship earned $22,000 less than MBAs guided by white males, the study found.

“When we asked, ‘Did you have a mentoring relationship with a white male?’ we found that white male MBAs were much more likely than women or nonwhite male MBAs to respond affirmatively,” Dreher said.

“These results do not necessarily point to discrimination,” he said, “but likely reflect the natural tendency to feel more comfortable with people like yourself--this level of comfort is probably related to the formation of career-enhancing mentoring relationships.”

Dreher noted that other studies suggested it might be advantageous for women and nonwhite men to form multiple mentoring relationships involving not only white men but also people of the same race or racial group.

“Our message is not that mentoring relationships should be exclusively with white men but that it is important for white men to be included among the group of people who provide developmental support to employees of organizations dominated by white men,” Dreher said.

“For minority professionals,” he said, “it might be just as important to have nonwhite male and female developmental relationships as well as whites. Both may be important for an Afro-American pursuing a managerial or professional career.”

Of the 758 people, there were 408 white men, 98 white women, 104 black men, 64 black women, 35 Latino men, 20 Latino women, 24 Asian men and five Asian women.

Those surveyed were graduates of Washington University, St. Louis; University of Michigan, Ann Arbor; Indiana University-Bloomington; New York University; University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill; University of Rochester, New York; University of Texas, Austin; University of Wisconsin at Madison, and USC.