Charlotte Wolters

Like many women, I found traditional mentorship wasn't working for me. When I began working, there were no solid formal mentorship programs. The few programs that existed were heavily flawed and in one case functioned more like the mentor-mentee relationship featured in the movie Mean Girls.

 

I was convinced that mentorship was invaluable but women's mentorship was lacking something. Over the years, I created my own mentorship network and personal mentorship program. 

 

In 2008, after completing some graduate work, I determined that women required a new feminist based mentorship model. In response, I conceptualized a new type of women's mentorship and coined the phrase "feminist mentorship gap". The question was would I have a chance to operationalize my thought experiment? This became the Feminist Mentorship Gap Project.

 

While studying law in 2010 at the University of Ottawa, the opportunity came along. Taking my theory and framework, I founded the Women's Legal Mentorship Program (WLMP). Since then the Women's Legal Mentorship Program (WLMP) program works with Canadian law schools to deliver women's legal mentorship programming and professional development.