Sponsorship Resources

2015 Leveraging Sponsorship to Advance Careers

The Office of Women's Careers and Office for Access & Title IX partnered to offer "Leveraging Sponsors to Advance Careers" on March 19, 2015. The forum was open to the entire UT Southwestern community, at junior and senior stages of their career/training.

Sponsorship has long been acknowledged as critical to becoming a leader in the business world, and has only begun to be recognized as important for becoming leaders in academia as well. Women, in general, are not sponsored to a similar extent as men.

Helen Yin, Ph.D., Associate Dean for the Office of Women’s Careers, opened the forum with a brief presentation on sponsorship followed by a panel discussion led by Merridth Simpson, Manager for the Office of Inclusion and Equal Opportunity.

2015 UT System Workshop

In collaboration with the UT System Women Senior Leaders Network, the Office of Women’s Careers held an inaugural workshop, “Sponsorship—Developing Future Women Leaders in the UT System,” January 21–23, 2015, in Austin, Texas. The workshop comprised approximately 75 preselected women, all representing one of the 14 University of Texas institutions.

The event targeted women faculty and administrators/executives who have the desire and potential to become senior leaders across the UT System (protégées). Matched with senior leaders from their institutions (sponsors), the goal for protégées (associate professors and equivalent level administrators/executives) is to gain new knowledge, skills, and a career plan to accelerate their path to executive leadership. The goal for sponsors is to establish a complementary plan for sponsoring their protégées into top positions at their institutions.

UT Southwestern attendees included: Helen Yin, Ph.D. (Sponsor and Workshop Organizing Chair); Suzanne Farmer, Ph.D. (Sponsor and Workshop Speaker); Cecelia Brewington, M.D. (Sponsor); Dipti Ranganathan, M.S. (Sponsor); Melody Bell, B.S. (Protégée); Ildiko Lingvay, M.D. (Protégée); Elizabeth Maher, M.D., Ph.D. (Protégée); Jenny Hsieh, Ph.D. (Protégée); Marissa Hansen, M.A. (OWC; Administrative Workshop organizer).

Learn more about the UT System Women Senior Leaders Network

View the presentations (PDF).

2017 Building Career Success: The Importance of Sponsorship

The Office of Women’s Careers (OWC) and the Women in Science and Medicine Advisory Committee (WISMAC) had their annual Fall Female Faculty Reception on October 24, 2017. The topic this year was “Building Career Success: The Importance of Sponsorship.”

Sponsorship has emerged as an important component of career development, and recent studies show that women are less sponsored than men, in both the business world and academia. This might contribute partly to the low percentage of women in upper level leadership positions.