By Laura Ratcliff

It’s been widely reported that women are attending college at the highest numbers in history. In fact, for the first time, the work force has more college-educated women than men, according to the Census Bureau – 37% of employed women held at least a bachelor’s degree, compared to 35% of men. The same trend holds true for graduate programs at the master’s level. Only 7.1% of men over 25 have completed a master’s program, compared to 8.1% of women. High achieving women are flooding into the professional workplace, and these numbers are only expected to rise.

Yet, a disturbing report from Harvard University highlights a serious gap in academic honors accorded to women in the class of 2009 at the Harvard Business School – which suggests a troubling trend in the nature of women’s participation in the workplace as well.

The study points out that these extremely smart, high performing women are self-censoring, even in business school. A lack of mentors may be to blame.

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By Nicki Gilmour, Founder and CEO of The Glass Hammer

Many women have a mentor or maybe even several mentors. But to get to the top, you need more – you need someone advocate for you, cash in their chips for you, and, frankly, wear a t- shirt with your name on it in the meetings you are not in: a sponsor.

The Sponsor Effect: Breaking Through the Last Glass Ceiling report compiled by Sylvia Ann Hewlett and the Center for Work Life Policy with Kerrie Peraino, Chief Diversity Officer of American Express, further defined for us what a sponsor is and what a sponsor does to enhance your career. Sponsorship is a huge part of getting women the stretch assignments they need to be promoted into senior executive positions.

Many women ask me how they should go about finding a sponsor. Now that we know what a sponsor does for you – advocacy at its very best – where does the rubber meet the road with finding one?

The answer: it all starts with networking, or rather building your strategic network (not just collecting a bunch of cards or catching up with a friend at an event). For example, as entrepreneur Heidi Roizen, a board member of TiVo and Yellow Media Inc., explained, “The best way to get to know other people is in the context of accomplishing something, like a volunteer project.”

Goldman Sachs hosted a seminar for women recently on “Building your Board : Unlocking Opportunity through Sponsorship” as part of their fantastic series of events called Brokering Change: A Wall Street Multicultural Women’s Exchange. This event in the series, which is open to women from other firms on the Street, addressed some of the specific challenges faced by Asian, Black, Hispanic and Native American women in the industry. In this case, a multi-cultural panel of women recounted their sponsor experiences, and rather than simply recounting the Sponsor Effect‘s findings, held a useful conversation on how to actually find a sponsor.

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By Stephanie Wilcox (Middlefield, CT)

In 2005 Tracy Britt and Teresa Hsiao were juniors studying economics at Harvard when they discovered that while women want to manage money and make money, there were few ways in which they could learn how to do the managing part. Though there were lots of investment clubs on campus, most of them included people who already knew about investing, and therefore many women were too intimidated to join.

So Britt, now 26, and Hsiao, 25, went to work creating Smart Woman Securities (SWS) to teach women about finances from the ground level.

During their 2005 summer internship at Lehman Brothers where they worked in equity research, the two ambitious young entrepreneurs were able to get a lot of good advice on how to structure the program.

“We worked through the summer to develop what we believed would be the best program and implemented it the next year in 2006,” said Hsiao. Despite the plethora of investing websites, Hsiao points out that, “There really isn’t anything else at colleges like this that is women-to-women. And a lot of these sites are more high level than what we try to provide, which is the basics.” SWS is an educational tool for women to learn about investing and to feel safe in a joint community where everyone is learning at the same time.

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Contributed by Kendra Reddy, Leadership Coach and Talent Consultant, Blueprint Strategies

Like you, I am thoroughly invested in my career and growth as a leader. To help me along this journey, I rely on the insights, advice, feedback, and guidance of others whom I respect and admire. For a long time, I hadn’t given much thought to categorizing or formalizing the role of each of these amazing individuals – I simply put them all on my list of Go To People – until recently, when a client asked me about the difference between a coach, mentor, and supporter. Here is the information and advice I gave her:

A coach is someone who is skilled at asking powerful questions designed to facilitate your self-discovery and unlock your own insights. They are there to help you find your own answers, and you usually do more talking than they do. A mentor provides more explicit advice (usually based on their own experiences) and is there to answer your questions and offer recommendations. When they speak, you listen. A supporter is someone who believes in your abilities, and actively advocates for you throughout the organization or industry. Often, they speak on your behalf.

Sponsors believe in you, champion your growth and development, help remove roadblocks and provide you with visibility at tables and in circles you may not have direct access to. They look for opportunities to share your achievements with those who, otherwise, may not be aware of the great work you’re doing. In a nutshell, they endorse your brand. With women making up more than 46% of the workforce, and 4 in 10 companies worldwide still having no women in senior positions… a glass ceiling is clearly still in place. Adding a sponsor to your personal Board of Trusted Alliances and Advisors is a smart strategy.

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