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Mentoring programs provide the scaffolding for effective career development and professional integration. Mentoring programs link more experienced political scientists with younger scholars at earlier career stages. Both groups benefit from this experience. Younger scholars gain strategic knowledge, career insights, and information essential for successful careers along with the support and encouragement offered by the mentor. Mentors may learn innovative teaching and research approaches, stay abreast of new thinking in their fields, and usually enjoy the fresh views of younger colleagues.

For a fortunate few, faculty mentoring programs at their universities structure these linkages and networks. For the majority of the profession, however, such mentoring programs are not among the informal pleasures of everyday life on a faculty. Most women and people of color remain in the minority in their departments and often lack the opportunities or support to find a mentoring relationship. An APSA initiative would overcome this uneven availability of mentoring opportunities and make it possible for women and minority political scientists to develop mentoring relationships independent of their individual work situation or geography.

The mentoring program should give special attention to women of color, lesbians, Latinas and Asian women, since members of these groups may be subjected to more than one form of subtle discrimination. Since a significant number of political scientists' work outside university settings, it also is important to provide mentoring services appropriate for women in non-academic positions. These women and people of color are members of the APSA, however, and we hope to be able to contact them via the WCPS, Latino Caucus and Black Caucus roster and by informal contacts with political scientists known for their work in non-academic positions. (Please, volunteer.) Women and minority political scientists outside of academia face many of the same kinds of problems and obstacles that affect academic women, including a lack of full integration and acceptance in the field. They, too, would benefit from mentoring. Such a mentoring program also would increase the relevance of the Association to non-university political scientists by helping to build the networks between them and university-based professionals.