Study Finds Race Matters More Than Gender in Who Gets a Mentor

Gowdy, G., Palmer, M. T., Saastamoinen, M., & Rivera, M. (2024). Using a social work perspective to understand contextual factors impacting access to informal mentorship for under-resourced and minoritized youth. Child and Adolescent Social Work Journal, 41, 1–14. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10560-022-00838-4

Introduction

Informal mentoring, caring relationships young people form organically with non-parental adults, has been linked to better physical and mental health, stronger social-emotional development, lower substance use, and higher self-esteem. These benefits appear especially significant for under-resourced and minoritized youth, yet little research has examined the contextual barriers that determine who actually gets access to these relationships. Gowdy and colleagues (2024) uses a social work lens, blending the person-in-environment perspective with Critical Race Theory (CRT), to ask what role family resources, economic distress, neighborhood conditions, and trauma play in whether a young person reports having an informal mentor, and whether these patterns differ by race and ethnicity.

Methods

Using the 2018–2019 National Survey of Children’s Health (N=32,883), the authors ran a logistic regression predicting the presence of an informal mentor from four contextual domains, family resources, economic distress, neighborhood resources, and trauma (measured via adverse childhood experiences), controlling for age, race/ethnicity, and sex. Four supplemental models then repeated this analysis separately for Black, Hispanic, White, and other/multiracial non-Hispanic subsamples.

Results

93% of the sample reported having an informal mentor, notably higher than prior studies (62%–67%), which the authors attribute partly to parent report rather than youth self-report. Seventy percent of the sample was White non-Hispanic, 12% multiracial, 11% Hispanic, and 6% Black non-Hispanic. Hispanic, Black, and multiracial youth were all significantly less likely than White youth to have a mentor (odds ratios of 0.35, 0.53, and 0.41 respectively). Girls were somewhat more likely than boys to be mentored overall. Economic distress and poor neighborhood quality were both associated with lower odds of mentorship. Family resilience predicted mentorship for every group except Black families. No measure of economic distress significantly predicted mentoring for Black families at all, suggesting race itself, more than economic circumstance, shapes Black youth’s access to mentors.

Discussion

The race-specific findings draw particular attention. Black families’ unique pattern, and the insignificant relationship between mentorship and either economic distress or family resilience, suggests race itself operates as a more powerful determinant of mentoring access for Black youth than economic or family resources do. The authors connect this to CRT’s claim that racism operates structurally, with Whiteness conferring unearned advantage. Safety increased mentorship odds for Black and multiracial youth but decreased them for White families, a pattern the authors say remains poorly understood and warrants further investigation into how place and race interact. Limitations include reliance on parent rather than child report (likely explaining the unusually high 93% mentoring rate), a survey item that didn’t distinguish informal from formal mentoring, and a definition of mentoring (“advice or guidance”) that may not capture the full range of support mentors provide.

Implications for Mentoring Programs

The authors draw on Rhodes and Lowe’s (2009) framework of needing to “stock the pond” and teach young people to “fish.” Stocking the pond means building “mentor-rich environments” in schools and community spaces where under-resourced youth already spend time. Teaching young people to fish means directly instructing them in how to recognize their need for mentoring and take initiative in building relationships, since under-resourced youth often don’t feel “privileged enough” to seek out an adult’s time. The authors also highlight youth-initiated mentoring as a promising alternative, where a young person actively identifies potential mentors from their own network, guided by a practitioner and monitored by the sponsoring agency, preserving youth voice in a way traditional matched programs don’t. For practitioners working with Black youth specifically, the findings suggest resource-based interventions, improving family economics or resilience, are unlikely alone to close the mentoring gap, since neither predicted access for Black families in this study.

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