Creating inclusive environments in cell biology by casual mentoring

Abstract

Informal mentoring affects the development of cell biologists by providing essential career, scientific, and educational guidance to mentees. In this piece, we discuss the importance of formally recognizing casual mentorship to encourage this crucial form of mentorship that contributes to the advancement of an inclusive cell biology community.

The importance of recognizing casual mentorship

Formal mentorships directly benefit from institutional support via programmatic infrastructure, funds budgeted to support training, and research programming. Because of the elusive nature of casual mentorships, no accepted framework acknowledges this important, yet often overlooked, mentor-mentee relationship in cell biology. Further, without increased awareness of the importance of casual, or informal mentorship, it may not be recognizable until the knowledge gained has been assimilated and compared to results from personal experiences.

Casual mentors volunteer their time and resources to achieve successful engagement with mentees. As casual mentoring activities may not directly contribute to the mentor’s research program nor results reported to funding agencies, there are no approaches for rewarding the positive effects casual mentorship has on the cell biology community. One might infer that casual mentorship is an expected part of the group leader job description. However, we do not believe this is the case. We have witnessed significant inequities in the distribution of casual mentorship between individuals, where some group leaders have a substantial casual mentoring burden, while others do not provide casual mentorship. Despite the immense value of casual mentorship, the disproportional involvement of some mentors in this activity compared to others creates disparities and redirects time from important activities such as research, grant writing, and teaching preparation. Finally, these inequities are intensified when stratified by race and gender [1, 2].

Many funding opportunities rely on documentation of a mentoring track record to demonstrate mentoring effectiveness, often determined by number of mentees, length of time as a mentor, and mentee outcomes. These funding opportunities affect mentors and individuals in their laboratories who may be applying for fellowships or career development awards. Casual mentoring is a mechanism to cultivate mentoring skillsets and build a mentoring track record to demonstrate mentoring competence. This article aims to bring attention to casual mentorship and provide systematic approaches to recognize, evaluate, and reward it within the scientific training ecosystem.

Leveraging casual mentorship to create equity

The probability that a student will participate in higher education and research is strongly influenced by the education level and career choices of their family members or guardians. Therefore, students from educationally advantaged backgrounds may have mentoring, in the form of role-modeling and guidance, embedded in their upbringing. In a recent study, 7218 professors in Ph.D.-granting departments in the United States across eight Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM), social science, and humanities disciplines, were surveyed to evaluate how the educational level of faculty members’ parents affected the respondents’ career outcomes. These faculty members were 25 times more likely to have a parent with a Ph.D.; this number doubled for more prestigious universities.[3] In this sense, individuals whose parents are also mentors have extensive knowledge about hidden doctrines within academia, contributing to disparities within academia.[4]

Individuals who do not have a mentor built into their upbringing must either be offered mentoring or seek it out. Further, first-generation professors from lower socioeconomic level backgrounds concede to a hyper-awareness of how disparate backgrounds affect careers paths; these backgrounds situate them as cultural outsiders in academia.[5] Funding disparities result when individuals with casual mentorship embedded in their upbringing and professional training are better poised for success, compared with those who must navigate obstacles alone.[6–8] Casual mentoring can alleviate some inequities in science and society, enrich the culture of academia, and boost overall career outcomes.

Establishing the parameters of casual mentorship

Due to the freeform nature of casual mentorship, it is not a scheduled activity within formal programming frameworks (i.e., Maximize Access to Research Careers Program¹, Initiative for Maximizing Student Development Program², Postbaccalaureate Research Education Program³, and graduate education programs, etc.⁴). Casual mentorship is seldom included in institutional structures whereby trainees are matched to a mentor through an application process or administrative pipeline. Instead, casual mentorship is an unofficial, unprescribed, and informal offering of mentorship from anyone with relevant experience or knowledge.[4, 9] Casual mentors can be anyone, ranging from Deans to colleagues in graduate programs to principal investigators to postdocs to research technicians. Casual mentorship is necessarily limited to hierarchal structures and can occur laterally between peers or from senior mentors to junior scientists and vice versa. We encourage mentors and mentees to offer and seek out casual mentoring to guide scientists in need.

Casual mentoring, illustrated in Figure 1, is a spontaneous form of mentorship that may be initiated by a future casual mentor collegiately saying to a prospective mentee: “Let me know if I can provide further support.”; or “I am available to set up a meeting to discuss this in more detail.” Alternatively, a future mentee may identify the need to seek guidance outside of their formal relationships and become the driving force to establish a casual mentorship. In this case, a future mentee may send a cold email or could recognize an opportunity with their prospective casual mentor and initiate the relationship by saying: “Do you mind if we follow up on this conversation soon?” Mentees seeking additional guidance should consider the benefits of casual mentorship and follow up with mentors to receive advice, guidance, feedback, and more.

Figure 1:

An illustration of potential casual mentoring initiations within the context of cell biology.

The casual approach to mentoring is already established in industries where it is understood that human capital and a culture of kindness directly influences economic growth and social cohesion.[10] Extrapolated to cell biologists, casual mentoring can be particularly valuable when used as a lever for the career development of individuals historically excluded from cell biology, such as People Excluded due to Ethnicity or Race (PEERs) [11], women, sexual gender minorities, disabled scientists, first-generation scientists including from disadvantaged backgrounds and beyond. Providing official recognition of casual mentoring will incentivize this important training mechanism and widely improve unmeasured qualities within the academic culture such as kindness and emotional intelligence.

Traits of a casual mentor

A casual mentor recognizes the merit of, and need for, understated support of a future mentee and cultivates an informal mentorship, regardless of who establishes the interaction. The casual mentor has unique experiential awareness to provide a mentee perspective that is lacking from their professional network. Therefore, topics of casual mentorship emerge in many categories depending on the mentee’s needs, ranging from technical expertise to educational and professional development. Although fundamental mentoring characteristics apply to casual mentorships, we highlight hallmarks that distinguish the casual mentor from other mentor types. Casual mentors:

• are adaptable with who starts the relationship, the frequency of interactions, and when the mentorship ends

• guide without expected reciprocation and share their philosophies without imposing on the mentee

• act as role models and possess experience to support the mentee’s development

• establish the foundation for the connection by sharing common interests and perspectives

• may be from different scientific disciplines, institutions, or departments from their mentees, thereby providing mentees with broad knowledge of a particular topic and an opportunity to expand their network

Incentivizing casual mentorship

Despite the immense value and enjoyment that comes from casual mentoring, this activity can redirect time from research programs, teaching responsibilities, and other activities of faculty members who are casual mentors. Due to the disproportional involvement of different faculty members in casual mentoring activities, casual mentorship may ultimately influence their perceived research, educational, and service contributions to the institution because this activity is not acknowledged. Quantifying, rewarding, and requiring casual mentorship for promotion and faculty review may aid in reducing such inequities and rightfully demonstrate the impact faculty members who are casual mentors can have.

There are many approaches to encourage leadership in casual mentoring. Departments could offer scholarships for credited classes that would enable a mentorship that was initially established as a casual mentorship to be officially supported. There are other options as well but in the least, we advise: (1) departments work to formally acknowledge the value of casual mentoring by adding it as a criterion for faculty hiring, annual reviews, and reviews for promotion; (2) individuals must reach an institution-dependent threshold of casual mentorship to qualify for highly sought after honors (i.e.: distinguished faculty/regents awards, endowed chair positions, etc.); and (3) casual mentors validate the effects of their mentoring activities by demonstrating how their efforts affect mentees within cell biology.

Quantifying and evaluating casual mentorship

It may seem that formal quantification of casual mentoring confounds the motivation for engaging in the activity and enforces transactional interactions. However, in our experience, casual mentorship is unrecognized and therefore unevenly distributed between mentors even though it is apparent that casual mentoring can support diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) of mentees within cell biology. We propose documentation and assessment of casual mentorship as a means to fairly distribute mentoring activities, identify group leaders who require further training to improve their mentoring skillsets, and guarantee that all cell biologists have equal access to high quality mentoring.

Casual mentorships are not recognized or assessed by search committees, degree programs, training programs, or funding agencies. This is a missed opportunity to review, evaluate, and recognize the diversity of mentorship and learn from experienced casual mentors. Bidirectional quantification (mentor evaluating mentee and vice versa) of how casual mentorship affects mentor/mentee outcomes and diversifies the scientific landscape will result in valuable recognition for casual mentorships, especially those that include PEERs. Furthermore, documentation could provide feedback not only to mentors aiming to improve their mentorship skillsets, but also to serve as a reporting measure for hiring, grant reporting, annual faculty reports, tenure documents, promotion, and awards.

Tracking the effectiveness of formal mentoring relationships is already challenging because it relies on complex interactions between qualitative and quantitative tools. Casual mentorship further complicates quantification because it encompasses informal nuances and potentially subjective criteria. However, results from standardized evaluations (e.g., self- and cross-evaluating surveys) [12–14] may be applied to build a framework for tracking the effectiveness of casual mentoring. Because casual mentoring can be a lever for enhancing equity within an institution, survey data will be highly relevant for reporting to funding agencies. As funding becomes dependent on enforcement of DEI plans, evidence-based casual mentoring will enhance the quality of training for the next generation of scientists.

In any case, a data-driven approach supported at the departmental level for measuring casual mentoring activities completed by principal investigators could be valuable to establish a baseline of data to review the quality, quantity, and distribution of casual mentoring activities. Once established, this will create a dataset that enables comparisons for the effectiveness of such activities between mentors and design of further initiatives. The services of expert third-party intake administrators could be employed to design surveys quantifying the quality of mentorship anonymously. Alternatively, collaborations may be built to design Institutional Review Board-approved surveys, enabling an internal study of casual mentoring efficacy occurring across disciplines while also potentially capturing crossover between departments. Nonetheless, we suggest a data-enriched approach could provide casual mentors and their departments with honest feedback and create a means to support institutional recognition and reward.

Finally, casual mentors should request follow-ups with their mentees to monitor how their mentorship may have influenced long-term career trajectories. This will not only help the mentor understand the influence of their mentorship and how they might improve, but also enables the mentor to maintain a relationship with mentees beyond when the mentorship is directly needed. This information can be used in the mentor’s curriculum vitae (CV), NIH Biosketch, and other institutionally required reports to highlight the value of casual mentoring activities. Including such information on documents that are used to gauge an individual’s qualifications is paramount for accountability from the perspective of improving empathy and overall beneficence in the cell biology community.

Concluding remarks

Casual mentorship can provide insights, training, and support not explicitly available to mentees within current academic cultural landscapes. We describe why casual mentorship is important for diversification of the scientific ecosystem, the mechanism of casual mentorship, the traits of a casual mentor, how casual mentorship should be incentivized, and how to quantify/evaluate casual mentorship. By acknowledging and encouraging casual mentorship, we aim to rewrite outdated doctrines maintaining inequalities in cell biology.