The presentation will focus on mentoring experiences in Italian universities and research centres. Notwithstanding, recent studies have confirmed a glass ceiling in Italian academia or segregation processes that negatively affect women’s access to academic and scientific careers; mentoring experiences in Italy are still underdeveloped but present exciting and innovative features. The presentation will analyse mentoring practices in Italy, focusing on innovative approaches and tools as well as resistance to change. In particular, it will focus on mentoring schemes to combat the practices and mechanisms that foster gender inequalities in academia, which adopt the dual approach to mentoring, as Jennifer De Vries (2010) proposed, simultaneously working to support women’s careers and create institutional change. In the last decades, mentoring programs have received criticism as they might not change the masculine model of the ideal academic but rather help women adjust to these norms to be successful (Ely & Meyerson, 2000; Van den Brink & Benschop, 2012). However, transformative mentoring programmes focused on changing the organisation have recently gained more attention. The presentation will, therefore, analyse the impact of the transformative mentoring approach in Italian academia, with particular attention to the gender asymmetries within the framework of the economic crisis and the neoliberal agenda (Archer, 2008; Bagilhole & White, 2013).

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