‘I Had Never Been Any Place Where Black Women Were Running Things’

Lauren Williams, the features editor at Essence, on the importance of mentorship in an industry short on diversity

A common piece of professional advice is to find a good mentor. But sometimes, that simple guidance is difficult to follow. For women and people of color attempting to forge careers in predominantly white or male-dominated industries, seeking out a mentor can be more challenging: Research has shown that mentors tend to choose mentees who remind them of themselves. And young mentees tend to be most comfortable with those who are from similar backgrounds.

On a larger scale, a lack of mentorship can compound an industry’s diversity problem, giving many younger professionals few people to champion or guide them, and causing them to leave a company or field before they ever reach an organization’s upper echelon.

Lauren Williams, who is 30 years old, works in media, an industry where diversity can be hard to come by toward the top of organizational charts. For anAtlantic series on mentorship, I recently spoke with Williams, the features editor at Essence and a newly-minted fellow at Harvard’s Nieman Foundation for Journalism, about her experiences in media and how…

Please read original article – ‘I Had Never Been Any Place Where Black Women Were Running Things’