Womanhood & Growth
There is a specific quality to the experience of being genuinely mentored by a woman who has navigated similar terrain — who understands the specific challenges of your position not just intellectually but from the inside. Who can say: I know what that intersection feels like. Here is what I learned.
This quality is not replicated by mentorship from men, however skillful or generous. Not because men cannot be excellent mentors — they can — but because the specific experiential knowledge of navigating the world as a Nigerian or Black woman is carried by the women who have done it.
It is not primarily the career advice, the networking introductions, or the professional endorsements — though all of these have value. At its heart, genuine female mentorship is the transmission of experiential knowledge: the specific, hard-won understanding of how to navigate the particular terrain of being a woman, in this culture, in this profession, in this time.
It includes:
The naming of the unnameable. The specific difficulties that are not acknowledged in professional development programmes — the double binds, the specific forms of sexism that are hard to prove, the navigation of success in a context not designed for you — are accessible to women who have faced them, and can be named for women who are just encountering them.
Permission to want what you want. The older woman who has built a genuinely good life — who has made her choices with full acknowledgment of their costs — is a living permission slip for the woman behind her. Seeing it done is qualitatively different from being told it is possible.
The honest account of the difficulty. Not the sanitised success story, but the honest account that includes the failures, the self-doubt, the moments of genuinely not knowing. This honesty is more useful than the performance of seamless success.
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Be specific about what you need. A vague request for mentorship produces a vague response. A specific request — "I am navigating X challenge and I would value your perspective on how you handled something similar" — produces genuine engagement.
Offer value in the relationship. Mentorship is not extraction. It is relationship. Find ways to genuinely offer something — your perspective, your skills, your genuine care for the person you are asking to invest in you.
If you are a woman who has navigated significant terrain — if you have built something, survived something, learned something hard — consider deliberately making yourself available to women who are earlier in their navigation.
Not as an obligation. As the recognition that what was given to you — in knowledge, opportunity, or the simple permission of seeing someone who looked like you succeed — deserves to be forwarded.
Related: The Comparison Trap · On Being a Woman Who Wants More · What It Means to Be a Modern Nigerian Woman
Nancy GLO
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