Sharing your own experience is a very powerful tool to help mentees, but doing so in the best way possible (being open and genuine) means being honest and also confronting biases that you may have.
When sharing your own experiences or listening to others and offering advice, it’s important to make sure that you do not invalidate experiences. It’s vital that you are upfront and acknowledge your privilege – PressPad’s mission is about breaking down barriers such as socioeconomic, regional, racial or accessibility issues that young people face when trying to enter the industry, so we need our mentors to be as educated and understanding on these issues as possible.
Many, if not all, of these issues are systemic within journalism – being a mentor means being a change-maker, but the first part is understanding how these issues are presenting themselves, how you may have at some point unknowingly perpetuated them and working to break them down for individuals who face them.
In fact, your mentee may not want to discuss these issues with you at first – a Harvard Business Review study found that minorities hesitate to share information about themselves at work – we would recommend reading the study to try and understand why.
We have provided some resources in order to help you on this! You can also read our glossary on overlooked diversity terms for further information.
Implicit bias
One of the first steps is becoming aware of any implicit biases that you may have. It can be difficult to understand what bias you have (we would all like to think that we don’t), but the only way to combat this is to acknowledge the bias, which can be uncomfortable, and consciously tackling it.
Project Implicit by Harvard University is a series of tests to help identify implicit bias. We encourage you to take one of their tests, by clicking here.
Hidden disabilities
According to The Hidden Disabilities Sunflower, 1 in 5 people have a hidden disability, which means that they have a disability that doesn’t have physical signs. They can include:
- learning difficulties,
- mental health
- mobility,
- speech,
- visual or hearing impairments.
They can also include asthma, as well as chronic illnesses when their impact on daily life is significant.
We ask to be aware of this so that every single person asking for our support is met with sympathy and understanding.
Recommended Reading
- The CIPD (Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development) have published a number of guides which we would recommend reading, including transgender and non-binary inclusion, how to talk about race at work and how to develop and anti-racism strategy.
- Trainingindustry.com have produced a guide on How to Use Coaching to Support Diversity and Inclusion
- Gov.UK have provided information on disability-inclusive language and behaviour.
- The Social Mobility Commission have published resources on how to have inclusive discussions about socio-economic diversity in the workplace.
- The Accentism Project have published a number of first-person experiences of accentism in the UK media.
- VeryWellMind published a piece on understanding white privilege.
- Expand The Circle published a piece on talking about neurodiversity at work.
- BetterUp have published a complete guide on workplace discrimination, including when individuals may be discriminated against on the basis of their faith, race, sexuality, gender and age.
Credit: John Schaidler via Unsplash
