Mentorship Programme

“If you can see it, you can be it”

Mentoring and role models are essential in every career path. Many of us have female trainees keen to lead research/clinical service/teaching programmes and seeing other women in these roles has inspired them to follow a similar path.

It is essential for all our junior lymphoma colleagues to see women in leadership roles within lymphoma. This not only helps the “you cannot be what you cannot see” hurdle but also leads to productive diversity on decision making boards.  

A key focus of Women in Lymphoma (WiL) is to mentor other women, encouraging them to put themselves forward for career progression opportunities. By highlighting other women’s achievements through WiLing Wednesday’s Webinars, a high-level education program, it allows identification of clear role models and mentors. Through this popular educational series across lymphoma histologies, we hope to show that these leading WiL are not exceptional but should be the norm. 

Nonetheless, the majority of lymphoma leaders internationally are male and mentorship is not a gender-restricted exercise. Emerging women need male mentors too, and senior women in lymphoma seek to mentor young men as well as women. 

To address issues with access to mentorship, we decided to create the Mentorship Programme and are launching the pilot phase of this project in collaboration with the Healio Community to provide a platform for anyone from the WiL community to self-identify on a voluntary basis as a 'mentee' and apply to be linked with a corresponding mentor from the WiL community on the Healio Community platform. The pilot is open to our entire WiL membership and we will be accepting 20 mentees at this stage. Once the connection is made by our team, the mentor/mentee relationship will be self-directed with various self-identified goals which can include career development, network expansion, experience in publication/research, starting in clinical trials, etc.