“They will say, ‘I want to mentor both young women and young men,’ but I can take a younger man out to a bar or to a golf course, and it doesn’t look weird. Whereas, if I were to take a more junior woman out to one of those settings to mentor them, it’s more complicated’,” she says, stressing that it is in these spaces that insider knowledge is shared, informal endorsements are made and potential successors are groomed, so gaps there have real consequences for promotion.
