State mentoring effort targets young women

About 100 senior business executives -- men and women -- are being enlisted to mentor 100 young women recently out of college, as part of a new statewide initiative announced Monday by Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand. She was speaking to more than 350 attendees at her first Women's Economic Empowerment Summit, held at New York University.

Women have made strides in government, nonprofits and as entrepreneurs, said Kathryn Wylde, chief of the Partnership for New York City, which is running the initiative in conjunction with the Council for Urban Professionals. Still, they "are seriously underrepresented at the top ranks of corporate power."

The new mentor-mentee matchup program, launching next month, was one of several solutions and suggestions put forward by Gillibrand (D- N.Y.) and other women leaders, who spoke on ways women can narrow the wage gap that found them earning 78 percent of what men did last year nationally. (Another recent estimate, of median weekly earnings, found that women in New York earned 86.8 percent of what men in the state earned last year, compared to 81.2 percent nationally.)

Certainly there are institutional roadblocks to women advancing professionally and economically, including the lack of affordable child care, said Gillibrand. But women also need to learn to advocate for themselves, said Valerie Jarrett, a White House senior adviser. Men, she said, do not "think it's indelicate to self-promote."

Several speakers pointed to the need for young women right out of college to start negotiating for higher salaries. A mentor can provide encouragement and help craft a "script" to use in negotiating for higher pay, said Carmen Wong Ulrich, personal finance contributor for the "Dr. Oz Show" on TV.

It's that kind of coaching the new mentoring program, aimed at helping women two to seven years out of college, is likely to provide, said Chloe Drew, executive director of the Council of Urban Professionals.

About 10 percent of the mentee slots are still open, she said. Two of the women selected so far have Long Island connections, one a graduate of Stony Brook University and the other a Long Islander employed at a major investment bank.

If the program is still around a few years down the road, "I would be so interested," said Imaan Moughal, 21, a senior at Hofstra University and intern in Gillibrand's Manhattan office.

Moughal, a political science major, said she was impressed by a speaker's comment that women need to have role models, a mentor and sponsors who can "put their own reputations on the line for you." Moughal said she asked herself, "Who are mine?"