Bamidele Farinre

Someone has sat with you. Listened to you. Told you that you are doing well, that you have what it takes, that your time will come. And then they went back into the room where the decisions are made and did not say your name.

That is the gap. And it is costing women, particularly those from underrepresented communities, far more than most organizations are willing to acknowledge.

I have written an entire book about mentorship. I believe in it deeply. The Mentor’s Journey: From Learning to Leading grew out of my own experience of being guided, supported, and encouraged by people who saw something in me before I could see it clearly myself. That kind of relationship matters. It genuinely changes lives.

But I have also watched too many talented women spend years accumulating advice, feedback, and encouragement, while people with less experience and less ability are quietly moved forward by someone who put their name on a shortlist, backed them in a room, and said: this one is ready.

That is not a mentorship problem. That is a sponsorship gap. And it is time we named it clearly.

“Mentorship tells you what to do. Sponsorship does it with you. One changes your thinking. The other changes your trajectory.”

Let’s be clear about what we mean

Mentorship

Someone gives you their time, experience, and guidance. They help you think through decisions, build confidence, and navigate your field. It is valuable. It is also a conversation. It does not move you forward on its own.

Sponsorship

Someone uses their social capital, their access, and their credibility to advocate for you in rooms you are not in. They recommend you for opportunities. They say your name when it counts. That is a fundamentally different act.

Why women get more mentors and fewer sponsors

This is not accidental. It reflects something real about how organizations work and who they trust with risk.

Sponsoring someone is a bet. When a senior person puts their name behind yours, they are putting their own credibility on the line. And the uncomfortable truth is that people tend to place those bets on people who remind them of themselves—people they already trust, people who feel familiar.

Women, particularly women from underrepresented groups, do not fit that familiar pattern for many of the people who hold sponsorship power. So what happens instead? We are offered mentorship. And we accept it gratefully, because it is something. Because someone is paying attention. Because we have been told, often implicitly, that the path forward involves proving ourselves more thoroughly, preparing more carefully, and waiting a little longer.

The preparation never ends. The wait continues. And the person who was less prepared but more sponsored moves forward anyway.

I have lived a version of this. I have watched others experience it in sharper form than I did. And I have sat in enough rooms now to know that the women most often told they are “not quite ready” are frequently more ready than the people being fast-tracked around them.

They are just not sponsored.

“Being told you are ready is not the same as being moved forward. Somebody has to do the moving.”

What happens when advice replaces action

When mentorship substitutes for sponsorship, several things happen over time.

Women become extraordinarily well-prepared and chronically overlooked. They complete every course, seek every piece of feedback, and work on every development area identified in every review. And still, opportunities go elsewhere—because preparation is not what unlocks them. Access is.

Confidence erodes quietly. Being told you are good, over and over, without the external validation of being moved forward, starts to feel like something other than encouragement. It starts to feel like management—a comfortable way of keeping someone engaged without giving them what they are actually ready for.

And talented women leave. Not loudly. Quietly. They stop raising their hands, stop putting themselves forward, stop believing that the next conversation will be any different from the last one. The organization loses them without ever understanding why, and the exit interview rarely captures the truth.

How we redefine this, right now

01 — For Women

Know the difference, and ask for what you actually need

If you have mentors but no sponsors, name that clearly in your next conversation with a senior person who has access. Do not ask for another coffee chat. Ask specifically: “Is there an opportunity coming up where you could put my name forward?” That is a different request, and it requires a different kind of courage to make. Make it anyway.

02 — For Mentors

Turn your mentoring into sponsoring, even occasionally

If you mentor someone and you believe they are ready, ask yourself honestly: have I said their name in a room where it counts? Have I recommended them for an opportunity, a panel, a project, or a promotion? If the answer is no, that is the next conversation to have. Mentoring without advocacy is incomplete. It is also, frankly, the easier part.

03 — For Leaders

Look at who you are actually sponsoring, not just mentoring

Most senior leaders can name their mentees. Fewer can give an honest account of who they have actively sponsored in the last twelve months—and whether that group reflects the diversity they claim to value. Pull that thread. The answer is instructive. And then do something about what it tells you.

04 — For Organizations

Build sponsorship into how you develop talent, not just mentorship

Formal mentoring programs are common. Formal sponsorship programs are rare. The difference in outcome is significant. Organizations that want to close representation gaps at senior levels need to build structures where sponsorship is an expected part of leadership—not something that happens informally for some people and not for others.

05 — For Everyone

Say the name. In the room. Before you are asked.

Sponsorship does not always require a formal role or program. It can happen in any meeting where an opportunity is being discussed and a name needs to be said. Think of the woman in your network who is ready, who has been ready, who keeps being told to wait. Say her name. Back it with specifics. That act, small as it sounds, is what changes trajectories.

A word from someone who has been on both sides of this

I wrote The Mentor’s Journey because I wanted to honour what mentorship had meant in my own life. And I stand by every word of it. But writing that book also gave me the language to see something I had not articulated clearly before: the mentors who changed my life most were the ones who eventually became my sponsors too. The ones who did not just guide me privately but advocated for me publicly.

Who said my name when I was not in the room.

Who made a phone call I did not know about that opened a door I had not known existed.

Not everyone has had that experience. Too many women—particularly Black women, women of color, disabled women, and women from working-class backgrounds—have access to plenty of advice and almost no advocacy. That is the gap we need to close. Not by abandoning mentorship, but by refusing to let it substitute for the thing that actually moves the needle.

The conversation is changing—slowly—but it is changing. And the more of us who name this clearly, who ask for what we actually need, who use our own access to advocate for others, the faster it moves.

You deserve more than good advice. You deserve someone in the room fighting for your seat at the table. If you do not have that yet, let this be the piece that helps you ask for it.

Bamidele Farinre, CSci, FIBMS, HonFellow AHCS

Chartered Biomedical Scientist | Educator | Author | Global STEM Advocate

Bamidele Farinre is the author of The Mentor’s Journey: From Learning to Leading and a contributor to the APPG on Diversity and Inclusion in STEM’s AI equity inquiry. She writes and speaks on mentorship, leadership, sponsorship, and what it takes to build systems that work for everyone. The No Ceiling Philosophy runs through everything she does: no limit on what you can learn, build, or become.

Influential Women | influentialwomen.com

© No Ceiling 2026 | Bamidele Farinre

Woman, Let’s Talk

About Your Mental Health.

Because It Matters.

Not the polished version you share with colleagues. The real one.

By Bamidele Farinre

Bamidele Farinre, CSci, FIBMS, HonFellow AHCS | Chartered Biomedical Scientist, Educator and Author

I want to start with something you might not have heard recently—not from your manager, not from your institution, not from the wellbeing newsletter that landed in your inbox during a week you were already drowning in. I want to say it plainly: how you are doing matters. Not how you are performing. How you are actually doing.

Because there is a version of this conversation that gets dressed up in self-care language and posted alongside a candle and a bath bomb. That is not this. This is about the real weight that many women, particularly those navigating STEM, leadership, or both, carry in ways that rarely get named out loud.

I have been that woman. I still am, some days.

“We have become very good at looking fine. And very good at paying the price for it privately.”

Part One

The weight nobody asked you to carry

If you are a woman in a professional environment, especially one where you are underrepresented, you will know this feeling: the meeting where you speak and the room moves on, and then someone else says the same thing and suddenly it lands. The performance review where your confidence is noted as a concern rather than your ideas being celebrated. The constant low-level calculation of how much of yourself to show today, in this room, with these people.

That calculation is exhausting. And it does not stop when you leave the office. It follows you home, into your sleep, into the conversations you have with yourself at 2 a.m. when the ceiling is very quiet and your thoughts are very loud.

None of this is weakness. It is the accumulated cost of operating in environments that were not designed with you fully in mind. Naming it is not complaining. It is the beginning of dealing with it honestly.

A question worth sitting with

When did you last tell someone the true answer to “How are you?” Not the short answer. The real one.

If you cannot remember, that might be something worth paying attention to.

Why we keep saying we are fine

There are good reasons women do not talk openly about struggling. In professional spaces, particularly in science, medicine, and technology, there is still a quiet belief that admitting difficulty is admitting inadequacy—that if you cannot handle the pressure, maybe this was not the right field for you after all.

That belief is wrong. But it is powerful. And it is reinforced every time a colleague pushes through something they should have taken time off for, every time someone apologises for needing support, every time mental health is treated as a personal failing rather than a human experience.

For women from underrepresented groups, there is an additional layer: the fear that struggling will confirm what some people already half-expect—that you are an exception, a quota, a risk. That any sign of not coping will be used as evidence against not just you, but everyone who looks like you and comes after you. That is an enormous and unfair thing to carry. And many women carry it silently every day because the alternative feels too costly.

“You were never supposed to earn your right to struggle. You are human. That was always enough.”

What actually helps

I am not going to give you a list of wellness habits, though some of those have their place. What I want to offer is more specific than that.

Find one person you do not have to perform for. Not a mentor who needs to see your best self. Not a friend from work who might pass something on. One person, inside or outside your professional life, with whom you can be fully honest. That relationship, if you can find or build it, is worth more than most other interventions.

Stop treating rest as a reward. Rest is not something you earn after you have done enough. It is something your body and mind require to function. When you frame it as a reward, you will always find a reason you have not quite earned it yet.

Notice the difference between tired and depleted. Tired is fixed by sleep. Depleted is something deeper. It is the feeling of having nothing left to give, of going through the motions, of work that once meant something feeling hollow. Depletion needs more than a good night’s sleep. It needs an honest conversation, possibly with a professional, about what is happening and what needs to change.

Ask for help before the crisis, not during it. We are not good at this. We wait until things are urgent, then reach out. But help is more effective—and easier to receive—before you hit the wall. The GP appointment, the conversation with your manager, the message to a colleague you trust: do it sooner than feels necessary.

One thing to do this week

Send one message to someone you have been meaning to check in with properly. Not the quick “how are you?” in passing. A real message. Ask them a specific question. Be the person who showed up before they had to ask.

What I want institutions to hear

This article is primarily written for women. But this part is for the organisations they work in, the institutions they study at, and the leaders who set the tone for what is acceptable to say out loud.

Wellbeing programmes that sit alongside cultures of overwork, dismissal, and invisibility are not wellbeing programmes. They are theatre. A yoga class on a Wednesday does not address the fact that certain women in your organisation are twice as likely to have their contributions overlooked, their concerns minimised, or their ambitions quietly managed down.

If you want to support the mental health of women, particularly those from underrepresented groups, the work is in the culture, not the calendar. It is in who gets promoted, who gets sponsored, who gets taken seriously when they raise a concern, and who gets quietly passed over while everyone nods about inclusion.

That is harder than a workshop. It requires honest self-examination at every level. But it is the only thing that actually moves the needle for the women who need it most.

A final word, from me to you

If you have read this far, something in here spoke to you. Maybe it named something you have been carrying without quite having the words for it. Maybe it reminded you of someone you should check on. Maybe it just felt good to have someone say it plainly rather than wrap it in professional distance.

Your mental health matters. Not because you will perform better when you look after it—though you probably will. Not because resilient people achieve more, though that framing is tired and I refuse to use it. Because you are a person. Because the life behind the career is the one that counts. Because the woman reading this deserves the same care and honesty she almost certainly extends to everyone around her.

You are allowed not to be fine. You are allowed to say so. And you are allowed to take up the space it requires to get better.

Bamidele Farinre, CSci, FIBMS, HonFellow AHCS

Chartered Biomedical Scientist | Educator | Author | Global STEM Advocate

Bamidele Farinre is the author of The Mentor’s Journey: From Learning to Leading and a contributor to the APPG on Diversity and Inclusion in STEM’s AI equity inquiry. She writes and speaks on mentorship, leadership, equity, and the human cost of systems that exclude. The No Ceiling Philosophy, built on the belief that there is no limit to what you can become, runs through everything she does.

Influential Women | influentialwomen.com

© No Ceiling 2026 | Bamidele Farinre

Influential WOMEN | Share My Voice. Inspire Others.

Leadership & Mentorship

The Mentor in the Machine Age

“AI did not end mentorship. It made the honest kind harder to find, and more necessary than ever.”

By Bamidele Farinre | Chartered Biomedical Scientist, Agilist & STEM Leader

I was once told that I did not have the head for science. I was young. The person who said it probably had no idea how long that sentence would sit with me, turning over in my mind, looking for a foothold. What pulled me through was not some inner certainty that they were wrong. It was a series of people, at different points, who saw something I could not yet see in myself and said so. That is what mentorship did for me. It gave me the evidence I needed to keep going.

I wrote about that in my first book, The Mentor’s Journey: From Learning to Leading. The feedback I received told me the same thing repeatedly: people recognised themselves in it—the self-doubt, the pivotal conversation, the mentor who changed their trajectory, and the promise made to themselves to become the person they once needed.

But here is what I could not have anticipated when I wrote that book in 2024: within months of its publication, the world would sharpen its focus on artificial intelligence in a way that would demand a whole new conversation—not a footnote, but a new chapter.

“The question is not whether AI belongs in our professional lives. It is already there. The question is what we do about the things it cannot do.”

Here is what I know for certain: AI cannot notice that a student is performing below their capability because they are exhausted from working night shifts. It cannot remember that you mentioned, eight months ago, that you were afraid of failing your people. It cannot sit with you in the specific discomfort of being the only person in the room who looks like you and say, with the weight of lived experience, “I know. Here is what I did.” No algorithm produces that. No chat interface holds that kind of weight.

And yet, right now, I am watching organisations quietly replace the budget they once spent on mentoring programmes with AI platforms. I am watching students who have never had a meaningful conversation with someone senior in their field spend hours asking chatbots for career advice. I am watching the gap between those with real human networks and those without grow wider, even as we congratulate ourselves on making information more accessible.

Information and guidance are not the same thing. That distinction matters enormously.

The Part Nobody Is Saying Loudly Enough

My work contributing to the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Diversity and Inclusion in STEM has brought me close to the AI equity conversation at a policy level. The inquiry has been examining how AI systems are perpetuating harm, particularly gendered harm, through biased training data, poor representation in design teams, and outputs that quietly disadvantage the very groups most in need of fair systems. When a hiring algorithm has been trained on a decade of promotion data from a sector that routinely overlooked women and people from minority ethnic backgrounds, it does not produce fair recommendations. It scales the original unfairness—efficiently and at speed.

This is not a warning about some future dystopia. This is happening in the same labs, hospitals, and institutions where real people are trying to build careers.

What does this have to do with mentorship? Everything.

Because mentorship has always been one of the ways people outside dominant networks found a way in. The senior figure who opened a door. The peer who shared unwritten rules. The sponsor who put your name in a room you did not know existed. Those relationships have historically compensated for structural disadvantage—imperfectly, but meaningfully. If we let those relationships thin out while AI systems with embedded bias fill the gap, we will not have modernised anything. We will have simply made exclusion harder to see.

“We cannot outsource the work of equity to machines that were not built with equity in mind.”

What I Am Asking of People Who Mentor

Be more specific. The world is full of warm encouragement right now. AI tools are excellent at generating it. What they cannot provide is the honest, sometimes uncomfortable observation that changes how someone sees themselves. “You are doing well” is not mentorship. “You consistently undervalue what you bring into the room, and I want to show you exactly where I see it happening” is mentorship. The specificity is everything.

Learn enough to ask the right questions. You do not need to become a data scientist. You need to know enough about how AI systems work to raise your hand when something looks wrong. When a tool is being used to evaluate performance, select candidates, or flag clinical risk, and the outputs seem to disadvantage certain groups consistently, that is a question worth asking loudly. Mentors help people develop the courage to ask those questions—model it yourself.

Stay visible. I mean this practically. Show up. Be the person who responds quickly because you are paying attention. Be the one who introduces someone in a meeting because you remembered they needed that connection. Technology can handle logistics. It cannot handle presence. Your presence, when it matters, is not replaceable.

And if you come from an underrepresented group in STEM, understand this: your experience of navigating systems that were not designed for you is not a personal anecdote. It is evidence. It is data the sector needs. Sharing it, with the people who need to hear it—including policymakers—is a form of mentorship that reaches further than any single conversation.

What I Am Writing Next, and Why

My forthcoming book, Mentorship in This AI Era: A STEM Leader’s Lenses, picks up exactly where The Mentor’s Journey left off. It examines, directly and practically, what mentorship looks like now: for students navigating AI-assisted learning, for educators recalibrating their role, for leaders building teams, for institutions designing fair systems, and for policymakers making decisions that will shape who belongs in STEM for the next generation.

It draws from my experience as a Chartered Biomedical Scientist, from my advocacy work, and from the policy conversations I have been part of. But mostly, it draws from the same place the first book did: real life—the moments that do not make it into the polished version of any career story, the ones that determine what happens next.

Because here is what I believe, without reservation: technology changes the pace. It does not change the question. The question, in every era, is: who is helping whom see what they cannot yet see? Who is holding the vision when someone else has lost theirs? Who is naming the truth when the room has gone quiet?

That is a human function. It has always been a human function. And right now, when machines are very good at giving confident-sounding answers, we need more humans willing to sit with the harder, less certain, more honest ones.

That is what mentorship is. That is what it has always been. And it is the most important thing I know how to write about.

Bamidele Farinre

Chartered Biomedical Scientist & STEM Leader

Bamidele Farinre is the author of The Mentor’s Journey: From Learning to Leading and a contributor to the UK APPG on Diversity and Inclusion in STEM’s AI equity inquiry. She is a STEM leader, mentor, and global advocate for equity in science and leadership. From early academic failure to becoming a recognised voice in STEM, her work focuses on resilience, ethical leadership, mentorship, and breaking systemic barriers. Her forthcoming book, Mentorship in This AI Era: A STEM Leader’s Lenses, continues the conversation on what human guidance looks like in the age of artificial intelligence.