Challenging male dominance through the substantive representation of women: the case of an online women’s mentoring platform

• Published date: 01 July 2020
• Author: Ana Lopes,Susan Durbin,Stella Warren
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/ntwe.12166
• Date: 01 July 2020

© 2020 The Authors. New Technology, Work and Employment published

by Brian Towers (BRITOW) and John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use,

distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Challenging male dominance through online mentoring 215

New Technology, Work and Employment 35:2

ISSN 1468-005X

Challenging male dominance through

the substantive representation of women:

the case of an online women’s mentoring

platform

Susan Durbin , Ana Lopes and Stella Warren

This article analyses the design of an online mentoring

platform—for women by women—in a high-technology,

male-dominated UK industry: aviation and aerospace. Based

on interviews with professionals and managers, we analyse

the journey of the women involved and contribute to the under-

standing of the role of women (individually and collectively)

in challenging gendered norms in a male-dominated industry

through the theoretical lenses of ‘critical actors’ and ‘critical

mass’. We combine these concepts, usually seen as mutually

exclusive, to explain the success of the online platform. We

show how a small number of self-selected critical actors rep-

resented, listened and responded to the needs of the women in

their industry, thus achieving the substantive representation of

women. We also argue that while critical actors were key to its

inception, the mentoring platform now needs a critical mass of

women to ensure its success.

Keywords: online women's mentoring platform, critical actors,

critical mass, substantive representation of women, aviation

and aerospace, gender equality.

Susan Durbin is a Professor in Human Resource Management, University of the West of England,

UK. She is a board member of the European Sociological Association’s Research Network 14, Gender

Relations in the Labour Market and the Welfare State. Her research elds are women working in male

dominated professions and gendered careers.

Ana Lopes is a lecturer in Human Resource Management at Newcastle University (UK). She has re-

searched and written on diversity, precarity and employment relations. She is a co-convener of GIBS

(Gender Issues in Business Schools), a newly formed PhD and early career researchers network, and

vice-chair of the Gender Relations in the Labour Market and the Welfare State (RN14) research network

of the European Sociological Association.

Stella is a Research Associate in the Bristol Leadership and Change Centre, University of the West of

England, Bristol, with a background in applied social research. Her research topics include social mar-

keting and the understanding of psychological pathways for behaviour change in health; gender and

inequality in organisations; the gender pay gap; and women working in male-dominated industries.

© 2020 The Authors. New Technology, Work and Employment

published by Brian Towers (BRITOW) and John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

216 New Technology, Work and

Employment

Introduction

Mentoring is an important but scarce source of career and social support for women in

male-dominated industries. Women’s mentoring schemes, especially when online, can

enable women to build support with other women across their industry which can, in

turn, help to challenge male dominance. Online mentoring platforms can make men-

toring more accessible to a geographically dispersed and under-represented group of

women.

The opportunities to build mutual support, solidarity and resilience, via information

communication technologies (ICTs) have been the focus of several studies published in

this journal. These have included the potential of ICTs to generate solidaristic practices

amongst female home-based workers, to combat exploitation (Torenli, 2010); the im-

portance of the internet in re-building mutual support and solidarity to the shop stew-

ards’ movement (McBride and Stirling, 2014); worker self-organising via Facebook as

a means to cope with the pressures of contemporary employment (Cohen and Richards,

2015); and trade union mobilisation via social media (Hodder and Houghton, 2015).

These studies demonstrate how independent, mutually supportive networks are pos-

sible (and growing) through ICTs and social media.

This paper offers a further perspective on the use of ICTs as a means to challenge

gender inequalities in the provision of mentoring, via an online platform (hereafter

referred to as the mentoring platform). The platform was designed for professional

women in the aviation and aerospace industry, one of the most male-dominated indus-

tries in the UK. Importantly, the platform enables women to receive mentoring re-

motely (e.g. while based in another country, on deployment or on maternity leave).

The platform matches mentors and mentees through specically designed matching

questions. Matching is automatic and achieved through algorithms built into the tech-

nological design eliminating the time required for manual matching. The mentoring

platform acts as an online community that is open to any professional woman em-

ployed by the industry. It is not ‘owned’ by a single employer but is administered by

the industry professional body.

This paper analyses the design stage of this mentoring platform by examining the

reasons why it was set up, the motivations of those involved and how women in a

male-dominated industry challenged the lack of mentoring available to them. We ex-

amine the actions of a small number of critical actors (Childs and Krook, 2006; Celis

and Childs, 2008; Celis et al., 2008; Childs and Krook, 2008; Childs and Krook, 2009;

Celis and Childs, 2012) in setting up the mentoring platform, who can be described as

self-selected representatives for women across the industry. We also focus upon the

growing critical mass of women who became involved in the design stage of the men-

toring platform (the ‘represented’) and, ultimately, its online users. The mentoring

platform is the outcome of the actions of this small number of critical actors, who rep-

resented the mentoring needs of women in their industry and delivered mentoring

support through the online platform.

The ‘substantive representation of women’, a key concept in our analysis, is dened

as, ‘an interactive process of interest articulation during which a multitude of interests

and perspectives can be formulated by many actors and during which the representa-

tives and the represented respond to one another in an interactive fashion’ (Celis and

Childs, 2012: 527). This embodies how the critical actors involved in the design of the

mentoring platform joined together to represent women across their industry and, at

the same time, draw a growing critical mass of women into the design process itself. It

was recognised at an early stage that the scheme would only be successful with a crit-

ical mass of women to support it, as a key enabler to building ‘supportive alliances’

(Kanter, 1977). This equates to more than simply the descriptive representation of

women (being a woman representative) and, instead, to the substantive representation

of women (representing what women want and need).

The critical actor concept originates from a critique of critical mass theory. Kanter

(1977) the original proponent of this theory, argued that only an increase in women’s