Case Study 23-1: The Sponsor Effect — Sylvia Ann Hewlett's Research on Who Gets Advocated For

Overview

In 2010, economist and gender researcher Sylvia Ann Hewlett, working through the Center for Talent Innovation (now Coqual), began a multi-year research project with a deceptively simple question: Why do women with comparable credentials and performance still lag men in career advancement?

The conventional explanations — work-life balance tensions, unconscious bias in evaluation, lack of confidence, insufficient negotiation — were all real and documented. But Hewlett's research found something that had been hiding in plain sight: the gap was not primarily about what women lacked in terms of credentials, performance, or personal qualities. It was about what they lacked in terms of advocacy.

Specifically, it was about the difference between having mentors and having sponsors.

The research, published in a series of reports and synthesized in the 2013 book Forget a Mentor, Find a Sponsor, produced findings that shifted how organizational researchers and practitioners thought about career advancement — and identified a specific, measurable mechanism behind what had previously been understood as diffuse bias.

The Research Design

Hewlett and her team surveyed several thousand high-achieving professionals in the United States, United Kingdom, Germany, and India across finance, law, consulting, technology, and other professional services sectors. The survey population was intentionally selected to be high-performing — all participants were described by their organizations as "high potential" or had already achieved director-level or above positions.

The survey was designed to separately measure mentorship and sponsorship using behaviorally specific questions rather than self-labels. Rather than asking "do you have a mentor?" (a question that might yield inconsistent answers based on how people define mentorship), the researchers asked about specific behaviors:

Mentorship behaviors measured: - Has this person provided career guidance and advice? - Has this person helped you navigate organizational culture? - Has this person given you feedback on your performance? - Has this person provided emotional support during difficult career moments?

Sponsorship behaviors measured: - Has this person advocated for your promotion when you weren't present? - Has this person recommended you for high-profile assignments? - Has this person connected you to senior leaders you wouldn't otherwise have met? - Has this person publicly endorsed your work or capabilities? - Has this person put their reputation on the line for you?

The distinction between these two categories was the core methodological innovation of the research. By separating them behaviorally, Hewlett could identify which professionals were receiving which type of support — and compare outcomes across the two groups.

Key Finding 1: Women and Men of Color Receive More Mentorship, Less Sponsorship

The most striking finding was the asymmetry in support type by gender and race.

Across the study population: - Women were 54% more likely than men to have a senior-level mentor (someone who met the mentorship behavioral criteria) - Men of color were also more likely than white men to have formal mentors - White men, however, were significantly more likely than women or men of color to have a sponsor — someone who had engaged in the advocacy behaviors on the sponsorship criteria

The pattern was consistent across industries, seniority levels, and national contexts (with some variation by country and sector, but the direction of the gap was consistent).

Hewlett's interpretation: organizations and well-meaning senior leaders had responded to diversity gaps in advancement by creating mentoring programs, informal mentoring relationships, and guidance-oriented support structures. These were sincere attempts to address the gap. But the support being provided was mentorship, not sponsorship. And mentorship, however excellent, does not put your name in a room you're not in.

Key Finding 2: Sponsorship, Not Mentorship, Predicts Advancement

The second critical finding addressed the question of what actually predicted career advancement.

When Hewlett's team controlled for performance ratings, educational credentials, seniority, and industry, and then examined whether mentorship or sponsorship predicted advancement outcomes (promotions to senior roles, high-visibility assignments, salary trajectory), the results were unambiguous:

Sponsorship was the primary predictor. Having a sponsor — someone who engaged in the advocacy behaviors — was significantly associated with: - 23% higher probability of receiving a promotion (women with sponsors versus women without) - 19% higher probability of receiving a stretch assignment (a high-visibility project with advancement implications) - Higher probability of being considered for roles the candidate hadn't applied for

Mentorship was not independently predictive of advancement outcomes after controlling for performance and sponsorship. Mentorship may have contributed to performance quality, but the causal path from performance to advancement ran through sponsorship — not through mentorship directly.

This finding reframed the career luck problem precisely. The question "why are qualified women not advancing at the same rate as comparably qualified men?" was answered not by differences in qualifications or performance, but by differences in the specific type of support they received: advocacy in rooms they weren't in.

What Sponsorship Specifically Adds That Mentorship Doesn't

Hewlett's research identified the specific mechanisms by which sponsorship generates career luck that mentorship cannot:

1. Opportunity creation in advance of qualifications. Sponsors regularly put forward candidates for roles and assignments before the candidate knew to look for them, and sometimes before the candidate met all the formal qualifications. Because the sponsor's advocacy reduced the hiring decision-maker's uncertainty, candidates with sponsor backing were seriously considered for opportunities that wouldn't have been on their radar.

Mentors can tell you about opportunities they observe. Sponsors create opportunities by deploying their relationship capital before the opportunity has even been formally designated.

2. Narrative management. In organizations, how people are talked about in leadership conversations significantly shapes their career trajectory. Sponsors actively managed the narratives around the people they advocated for — consistently framing their work positively, correcting misperceptions when they arose, and ensuring that high-visibility successes were attributed correctly.

Mentors discuss with mentees how others perceive them. Sponsors actively shape how others perceive them, in conversations the mentee doesn't have access to.

3. Access to informal networks and information. Senior leaders have access to information about organizational priorities, upcoming restructurings, new initiative plans, and candidate shortlists that is simply not available to more junior employees through formal channels. Sponsors selectively share this information with people they are advocating for, giving them preparation time and decision-making advantages that non-sponsored peers lack.

4. Credibility transfer in evaluation. When a highly credible sponsor endorses a candidate, some of the sponsor's credibility is effectively transferred to the candidate. The evaluation process changes: instead of "should we trust this person?" the decision-maker is asking "should we trust [trusted sponsor]'s judgment about this person?" — a much easier question to answer positively, because the decision-maker already has an answer to it.

The Equity Implications: A Structural, Not Just Personal, Problem

Hewlett was careful to document that the sponsorship gap was not primarily the result of women failing to seek out sponsors or failing to cultivate the right relationships. The gap persisted even when controlling for networking behavior, relationship-building effort, and self-advocacy.

Instead, the gap reflected structural patterns in how senior leaders identify and invest in potential:

The informal relationship pipeline: In most organizations, sponsor relationships develop out of informal contexts — working late together on a deal, casual conversations after meetings, social events after work hours, activities (golf, sports, client dinners) that have historically been more accessible to men. Women, particularly those with family responsibilities and those navigating environments where after-hours socialization involves discomfort or risk, have less access to the informal contexts where sponsorship relationships typically begin.

The competence credentialing burden: Hewlett's research found that senior leaders often required more direct performance evidence before sponsoring women and people of color than they required before sponsoring white men. The same level of performance was judged differently based on who was performing it — with women and people of color asked to "prove it again" before receiving sponsor confidence that white men received at lower performance thresholds.

The risk asymmetry in sponsoring: Sponsoring a candidate whose failure would reflect poorly on the sponsor's judgment creates an asymmetric risk. If a sponsor is in an environment where their judgment about a non-traditional candidate (a woman, a person of color) would be more scrutinized in case of failure than their judgment about a white male candidate, the perceived risk of sponsoring non-traditional candidates is higher — even when the objective likelihood of success is identical.

This is not a story about bad individual actors. It's a story about how structural patterns in organizations create and maintain luck gaps through the aggregation of individually understandable decisions.

The Organizational Response: What Works, What Doesn't

Hewlett's research, and subsequent work by other researchers, also examined organizational interventions. The conclusions were sobering:

What doesn't work: - Mentoring programs alone. Adding more mentoring doesn't address the sponsorship gap; it may reinforce it by directing organizational energy toward the wrong type of support. - Awareness training without structural change. Training senior leaders to be aware of the sponsorship gap produces short-term changes in stated behavior but limited long-term changes in actual sponsorship behavior.

What shows more promise: - Formal sponsorship programs where senior leaders are explicitly assigned to sponsor specific high-potential employees — and where their performance as sponsors is measured. This shifts sponsorship from informal relationship-based selection to a partially formalized process. - Transparency in promotion decisions — creating explicit documentation of who is being considered for advancement and why, which makes the role of informal sponsorship visible and subject to oversight. - Expanding the informal contexts where sponsorship relationships develop — creating formal high-visibility projects and presentations where senior leaders can observe junior talent in lower-risk settings.

Discussion Questions

  1. Hewlett's research found that women receive more mentorship but less sponsorship than white men — and that this explains a significant portion of the career advancement gap. Does this finding change how you think about organizational "diversity programs"? What would it mean to redesign such programs with the mentor/sponsor distinction in mind?

  2. The research suggests that sponsors are selectively extending trust to people whose potential they can evaluate confidently — and that similarity (shared background, shared experiences) enables more confident evaluation. Is this a cognitive bias that should be corrected, or is it a rational use of trust information? If it's both, how do you navigate that?

  3. If you are in (or plan to be in) a senior position, what would a concrete commitment to equitable sponsorship look like? What specific behaviors would you adopt? What would you need to change about the informal patterns of your professional life?

  4. Hewlett argues that individuals can and should seek out sponsors proactively. But her research also shows that the access barriers to sponsorship are structural, not primarily individual. Is it fair to put the burden of solving a structural problem on the individuals most disadvantaged by it? What is the relationship between individual strategy and systemic change in this domain?

Key Takeaways from This Case Study

  • Hewlett's research documented that women and people of color receive significantly more mentorship but significantly less sponsorship than white men — a distinction that explains a substantial portion of the career advancement gap among equally qualified professionals.

  • The specific behaviors of sponsorship (advocacy in rooms you're not in, opportunity creation, narrative management, credibility transfer) generate career luck that mentorship cannot produce, because they operate on the opportunity set itself rather than on the candidate's performance within an existing opportunity set.

  • The sponsorship gap is structural, not primarily individual: it arises from informal relationship pipelines more accessible to men, differential competence credentialing burdens, and perceived risk asymmetries in sponsoring non-traditional candidates.

  • Organizational interventions that address the mentor-sponsor distinction (formal sponsorship programs with accountability, transparent promotion processes, expanded formal visibility opportunities) show more promise than mentoring programs or awareness training alone.

  • For individuals: understanding the distinction is the first step. The second is honest auditing of your current support structure — and deliberate cultivation of the sponsorship relationships that generate career luck, through the specific behaviors described in this chapter.