Mentoring Female Students in Engineering as a Way of Caring

In this chapter, we report on a mixed research study about the ways mentors attribute meaning and purpose to the practice of mentorship in a program for first and second-year female students of industrial engineering at Pontificia Universidad Católica de Valparaíso (Chile). A quantitative analysis (principal components) of 28 mentors’ responses to a questionnaire about their motivations to be mentors prompted us to examine more deeply one of the factors found. Motivations constitutive of this factor referred to mentors’ ways of attributing meaning and purpose to their practice, which can be understood in terms of caring. Four focus groups with 13 mentors in total allowed us to advance further into the examination of what the good pursued by this practice of mentorship meant for them. In our analysis, we drew from Tronto’s four phases of care: caring about, caring for, caregiving and care receiving, and their corresponding defining moral elements: respectively, attentiveness, responsibility, competence, and responsiveness.