Abstract:

This paper serves to voice the silence on gender issues with regard to mentoring in Singapore education research, in the context of relevant background pertaining to the development of aspiring school leaders in the Singapore education system. With the system-wide instituting of mentoring in Singapore, many school leaders have reaped the benefits of mentor-protégé relationship both while in the programme and in the beyond phase of the relationship that propels them into a wider collegial network. The author offers evidence that research on mentoring in Singapore has generally ignored the existence of gender issues. Implications for practice are surfaced, in particularly, the absence of acknowledgement of gender issues in mentoring could undermine the creation of new approaches for the structuring and sustaining of positive interactions in an increasingly complex and evolving working environment.