Comment of the week

Albert Einstein

Theoretical physicist

All of science is nothing more than the refinement of everyday thinking.

Scientists who reflect on their racial and ethnic identities—as well as on those of their mentees—have the potential to be better mentors. And mentees of these scientists were also more likely to say their mentors were respectful of, and held space for conversations about, race and ethnicity. Those are the take-home message from a new randomized controlled trial—the first of its kind.

“Race matters in mentoring,” says Stephen Thomas, a social behavioral scientist at the University of Maryland, College Park who was not involved in the new study.

Mentoring is a fundamental part of a scientist’s path. Mentors help shape not only who young researchers will become, but also how they see themselves in their fields. But mentors often focus solely on the research, ignoring or downplaying their and their mentees’ personal identities—including race and ethnicity. Some seem to think that acknowledging identity gets in the way of doing good research, says Angela Byars-Winston, a counseling psychologist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison who led the new study, whereas others fear being inadvertently discriminatory. For example, “There’s always the danger of … awkwardness or of creating a difficulty where none existed,” a white, male mentor told Byars-Winston and her team during a previous study.

A growing body of work highlights the shortcomings of this mindset. A 2019 National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine report chaired by Byars-Winston, for example, found that students’ and mentors’ race and ethnicity affect how the students experience mentoring. This new study is the first time the effect of cultural diversity awareness—recognizing one’s own culturally shaped beliefs, perceptions, and judgements, as well as identifying cultural differences and similarities in other people—in mentoring has been quantified, Thomas says. “I was just so impressed with the rigor [and] the elegance” of the new study.

One takeaway of the National Academies report was that mentors should reflect on how their biases and prejudices may affect mentees. Following that recommendation, Byars-Winston and her colleagues wanted to see whether having mentors attend a short training session could increase awareness of their own racial identity when mentoring students.

To test this, 197 scientists—most of them white women—who were mentoring 117 undergrads—who were completing a 10-week summer research program—were enrolled in a program called Entering Mentoring, a science, technology, engineering, and math–focused curriculum that includes training mentors on concepts such as addressing equity and inclusion and cultivating ethical behavior and which has previously been shown to help improve mentoring skills. All mentors—who ranged from faculty to graduate students in the life sciences at 32 U.S. research institutions—were assigned to complete the Entering Mentoring program in four 2-hour sessions.

One group of 110 mentors completed an equity and inclusion module that is standard with the program, in which participants identify mentor-mentee differences—such as gender, age, race, or socioeconomic status—and discuss things that they can do to minimize bias, prejudice, and stereotyping. The experimental group of 87 mentors instead completed a different 2-hour module focused on enhancing the mentor’s cultural diversity awareness. In this module, the mentors had to discuss ways underrepresented students react to discrimination, watch animated videos that showcased students’ experiences, and role-play scenarios in which mentors stepped into the shoes of fictional students from minoritized groups.

The experimental training made a marked difference, both from the perspective of the mentees and the mentors, the team reports today in Science Advances. Mentees whose mentors were in the experimental group rated them higher on cultural diversity awareness behaviors, compared with those in the control group, and said their mentors approached topics of race in a respectful manner and created opportunities for them to bring up issues of race and ethnicity as they arose. And in mentor self-assessment, the experimental group members were twice as likely to report that their racial identity matters to their mentoring relationships, compared with the control group. Mentors in both groups reported the training helped them with various facets of mentoring, such as confidence and communication.

“The fact that you can see real changes with [a pretty short intervention] was quite dramatic,” says Richard McGee, a researcher who studies faculty development at Northwestern University and who was not involved in the new study.

“This type of work is important for systemic change,” says Janelle Peifer, a clinical psychologist at the University of Richmond who was not involved in the study. A National Science Foundation report from this year, for instance, found that racial and ethnic disparities still persist at every level of academia in the United States, starting at the undergraduate level. Whereas most of the mentors in the study were white women, the racial makeup of the mentee group was more diverse to likely encourage cross-cultural awareness: Almost twice the proportion of mentees than mentors were Black and more than one-third of the mentees were Hispanic (only about 13% of mentors identified as such), whereas more than one-quarter of the mentees were Asian (in contrast to roughly 14% of mentors). The cultural awareness training, she says, is a “really actionable and feasible strategy to address what has been a very intractable issue in the field, that we continue to try to address.” This is crucial, she adds, because “mentoring can be harmful if not done well.”

Peifer would like to see a follow-up of the new study, with data from impartial observers who asses the behavior of mentors and mentees, as opposed to self-assessments. The team is now working with McGee on a larger, longer trial with graduate students and their mentors in 35 U.S. universities to measure how an immersive training session in cultural identity affects mentoring and how it changes the institutions’ teaching quality.

Despite the evidence in its favor, having mentors undergo evidence-based training is still rare across the country, Thomas says, and even rarer that the training they get include issues of race. “I’m filled with a sense of urgency,” he adds. “Culture-based mentoring is absolutely needed. … How many more studies do we need to tell us that it works?”