Examples
Worked examples
- Is an instance
A department chair who nominated a junior faculty member for a major society award and lobbied the committee on her behalf
Counter-examples
Looks similar, but isn't
- Not an instance
A mentor who offers advice but never advocates beyond the dyad is not sponsoring
Editorial commentary
The mentor/sponsor distinction (Ibarra et al.) is now central to discussions of equitable career progression because sponsorship is often informally allocated and correlates with advancement more strongly than mentoring alone. Funders are starting to recognise sponsorship activities in narrative CVs of senior researchers.
References
- Ibarra et al. 2010 ‘Why Men Still Get More Promotions Than Women’ HBR
- National Academies ‘The Science of Effective Mentorship in STEMM’ (2019)
Also known as
Career sponsor · Advocate
Machine-readable encodings
Use in your systems
xml
<role vocab="credit"
vocab-identifier="https://casrai.org/dictionary/"
vocab-term="Sponsor (career)"
vocab-term-identifier="https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/sponsor-career" />json
{
"@context": "https://schema.org",
"@type": "DefinedTerm",
"@id": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/sponsor-career",
"name": "Sponsor (career)",
"identifier": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/sponsor-career",
"description": "A senior researcher or leader who actively advocates for a more junior researcher's career advancement — nominating them for opportunities, opening doors, vouching for them in evaluations — distinct from a mentor (who advises) by the action of using social and political capital on the mentee's behalf.",
"inDefinedTermSet": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/domain/mentorship-career-stages#set",
"url": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/sponsor-career",
"sameAs": [
"Career sponsor",
"Advocate"
],
"license": "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/",
"publisher": {
"@id": "https://casrai.org/#organization"
},
"dateModified": "2026-05-21T02:02:16",
"inLanguage": "en"
}
