We spoke with Dr. Diana Montoya-Williams about the importance of diverse mentorship, what faculty and trainees can do now to uplift one another, and how early career scientists can be supported in their personal goals while pursuing their career.
How does diversity in academia benefit trainees?
DMW: When it comes to succeeding in any career, whether it is medicine, academic medicine or something else, mentorship and sponsorship is so incredibly critical. Two people can work really hard but if one is trying to learn to navigate their field alone and without lived experiences and guidance from someone who has their best interest at heart and the other person has someone who cares for them, remembers to mention their name in important rooms, speaks their name for opportunities and helps their mentee avoid pitfalls, those two people’s experiences may be vastly different with respect to personal fulfillment and success.
A diverse faculty pool means that underrepresented mentees will be able to identify someone who looks like them and as a result may have similar lived experiences, fears, hopes and challenges...Although racial or gender concordance is not necessary for a fruitful mentorship relationship, shared backgrounds can increase the chances that a mentee might feel safe to really be themselves, share their struggles and receive advice or guidance that comes from a place of deeper or shared understanding.
As a woman and mother, I can attest that it is simply easier for me to share the struggles I have had balancing my academic career with early motherhood with other academic mothers. Similarly, I have been able to share frustrations or joys with other Latinas in medicine that maybe someone who does not identify as Latina might understand but not have lived through themselves. Mentees who have such mentors in their life are then buoyed by such relationships, either directly or indirectly. It is much easier to feel fulfilled and spend more of your mental energy on work and innovation when you feel seen and appreciated for every aspect of who you are at work. For underrepresented members of academia, whether that be women or minoritized people of color, faculty that come from similar backgrounds are critical.
How can current faculty and trainees support one another?
DMW: I have found that faculty from traditionally underrepresented backgrounds often understand what it’s like to journey through academia alone or be otherized perhaps because of personal experiences or experiences of others in their family or social circles. As a result, [these faculty members] sometimes work extra hard to be inclusive, to reach out, to speak names of mentees in rooms they are now privileged enough to be in. These types of behaviors change environments and cultures into ones that foster collaboration and are uplifting for all.
How can graduate programs support trainees in their personal goals?
DMW: As an undergraduate, I once heard a working female physician speak to a group of female premed students and tell us that there was no good time to start a family. So we should just do it when we wanted to, if we wanted to, and things would be figured out along the way. I remember feeling discouraged, but now that I have finished my medical training and have been a faculty member for several years with two young kids to boot, I realize the wisdom of what she meant.
Every chapter of a working person’s life is unique with unique challenges and joys. Having and caring for young children is tough, no matter what stage of academia you are in. It’s just a tough, sleepless though beautiful journey. There is always a way to make things work with your career and your children simultaneously but it will require recognizing the need for help often and asking for it. But in no way, shape or form, does getting engaged, married or starting a family mean we are trying to wrap up our careers. In fact many of us are launching them simultaneously.
So, the first thing programs can do is normalize that concurrence at every stage. It should be an expectation that some graduate students or trainees may have very important demands on their time and attention including significant others, aging parents, or children. Administrators, professors, lecturers…every person within academia can help normalize this reality so that people don’t have to feel like they have to choose. Like they are either a bad parent or a bad student. In the end, what goes a long way is for programs to recognize people as adult learners who can be entrusted to make choices to fulfill their career and their personal goals outside of their career and create flexibility in requirements, classes, training, research, etc. People rise to the occasion often when you allow them to have agency and empower them to be their best self.
And finally, my goodness what a difference it would make if academia decided to take on the perennial, foundational, incredible challenge that is finding and affording quality childcare. Imagine how successful, focused, innovative and fulfilled people at every stage of academia would be if institutions decided to provide (and maybe even fund) good accessible childcare, especially to those for whom it might be a particular financial hardship. That would be truly transformative.