The biggest difference came from the women around me. Victoria taught me how to navigate Danish working culture as someone who'd also moved here from Latin America, while Katerina taught me that chasing the "optimal" career path is a waste of time, because you will never know beforehand what the outcome will be. Every woman I worked with, directly or indirectly, helped me feel like I belonged. They took my naive questions seriously, and through their own lived experience, sketched out possible paths I could actually see myself on.

But mentorship wasn't always easy to find. Sometimes I'd work up the nerve to reach out, only to realize there was no chemistry. Other times the structure got in the way. I once joined a mentorship program where there was no option to rematch if things weren't working. My mentor had less experience than I did in the area I needed help with, and we both knew it wasn't the right fit. The mentorship quietly fizzled out.

There are more women in STEM than there used to be, and that progress is real. But representation still thins out the higher you look, down to just 25.9% of leadership roles in the US federal STEM workforce.² Representation isn't the same as influence, and that gap shapes what gets researched, funded, and built. Women's health is still understudied relative to men's, decades after researchers first raised it as a problem.³ Technology keeps shipping fast, in ways that affect women differently, and not always for the better. Who's in the room changes what gets built and who it's built for.

I don't think mentorship fixes all of that. But I do think it's one of the few things that consistently changed my own experience. When we started talking to other women in STEM, we heard many of the same stories: great mentors could make an enormous difference, but finding the right one was often left to chance.

That's why we are building Mently: mentorship designed around the people in it, where mentors and mentees can find each other based on shared interests, goals, and experience, so every mentorship has a better chance of becoming meaningful.