"Womentor puts words into action"

Last week saw the start of the ninth edition of Womentor, this year with more companies involved than ever. For the 70 mentees and mentors involved in the leadership development program, the introduction day where they got to know each other was the start of at least 24 hours of meetings - spread out over the coming year.

One of this year's mentor and mentee pairs is Ulrika Holmbring, Product Director R&D HR & Financials at IFS and 2014 Womentor Award winner (!), and Erika Silow, Career Developer, Project Manager and Systems Analyst at Capgemini. Here they talk about what Womentor means - for the industry at large and for them personally.

Erika Silow, mentee 2015:
- Womentor is important for companies and management to become aware of the problem of inequality. Everyone is in favor of gender equality, yet it takes so long for it to happen. This is a way to draw attention to the problem and do something about it.
For me personally, I hope that the mentoring program will, among other things, help me figure out what I really want to do and should do, where my passion and my skills as a leader meet.

Ulrika Holmbring, mentor 2015:
- Womentor is important because it recognizes the many talented women working in our industry. It is great to see!

The program makes the world and the participants aware of the need to improve gender equality and diversity to strengthen the industry and ensure long-term profitability. Thanks to the active engagement of management in many of the companies, awareness is growing across the industry. The mentoring program also has an important role in disseminating knowledge, which is based on solid scientific research. A very important difference that Womentor makes is putting words into action. Increasing the proportion of female leaders in the industry requires concrete action.

At the individual level, Womentor is good at highlighting and developing competent people. One of the cornerstones in this regard is the actual matching between mentee and mentor, which Womentor's mentoring program has succeeded very well with. Personally, I am very much looking forward to being a mentor in 2015 and getting to know Erika and hopefully giving her the strength to be the wonderful woman and leader she is and dare to choose her way forward.

I participated in the program myself as a mentee a few years ago and my experience is that it has helped me become a more confident female manager!