To celebrate International Women’s Day 2026, WFSA’s DEI Committee Member Vojislava Neskovic reflects on how mentorship and sponsorship can help women overcome invisible barriers and advance in academic anaesthesiology.
Give It to Gain: From Mentorship to Sponsorship
Who are your mentors? And who is speaking your name to promote your career?
By Vojislava Neskovic
The most distinguished academic careers are not built solely on intellectual brilliance. They are the result of the interplay between individual performance and hard work and number of different relationships and support. They rely on individuals who chose to give—their time, influence, networks, and sometimes even their spotlight—so that others could grow. In this sense, the principle of “give it to gain” captures a truth of academic life: by elevating others, we ultimately strengthen our disciplines, our institutions, and ourselves.
Mentorship as an Act of Intellectual Generosity
Mentorship is often described in functional terms: teaching, advising, reviewing drafts, guiding career decisions. But at its core, mentorship is an act of giving. Mentors share hard-earned knowledge without immediate personal gain. They make space in crowded schedules to read manuscripts, rehearse presentations, advise or talk through career crossroads. At any career stage professionals may benefit from mentoring helping them overcoming contextual barriers.
Contemporary views of mentorship emphasize supporting individuals “take charge of their own development” and become better at improving themselves. This framing underscores that mentorship should never be about control; it is about empowerment. A generous mentors do not seek to replicate themselves in a junior colleague but instead help them clarify their own goals and values.
The rewards are long-term and often intangible: seeing a former trainee flourish, witnessing them surpass expectations, knowing that a small investment of time altered the course of a career. Yet, aside from personal fulfilment, mentors also gain their own development in leadership, coaching skills and their own professional advancement.
Mentorship is developmental. It builds competence and confidence. But alone does not always open doors.
Sponsorship: The Courage to Share Power
If mentorship is guidance, sponsorship is advocacy.
Sponsors do more than advise; they actively use their influence to create opportunities. They recommend a junior colleague to lead a high-impact study instead of assuming the role themselves. They nominate them for a guideline committee, an editorial board, or an invited lecture. This is a different level of giving. Sponsorship requires not only time, but also reputation.
Many early career scholars have experienced excellent mentorship but remain stalled because no one was willing to advocate for them where it mattered most. Conversely, a single committed sponsor—someone who consistently opens doors and amplifies their voice—can accelerate a trajectory dramatically.
By sharing visibility and opportunity, senior leaders do not diminish their own standing. Instead, they cultivate stronger teams, more dynamic collaborations, and more resilient disciplines. In short: mentors talk with the mentees; sponsors talk about those who support.
Mentorship and Sponsorship: Academic Anaesthesia Needs Both
Decline in academic anaesthesiology is persistent despite strong efforts to reverse it. Known barriers such as long training pathways, variable salary, lack of protected time for academic work and poor long term research funding are more difficult to overcome. If this trend continues, the consequences are serious. Without deliberate cultivation of future leaders, academic anaesthesiology risk losing their capacity for innovation and rigorous evaluation of practice.
A focus on mentoring, sponsoring and diversity is critical to sustaining academic anaesthesiology.
Women, racial and ethnic minorities, scholars from low-resource environments, and those outside established networks frequently encounter barriers that mentorship alone cannot overcome. They often confront the glass ceiling, an invisible barrier which limit upward mobility. Those barriers are various: cultural, structural, network-based and very often hidden within meritocratic systems. Women are often pushed aside with the assumption of existing obstacles in their family roles and availability, seen more suitable for the low visibility tasks, and evaluation bias due to childbearing leaves or need for more flexible working hours. A maternal wall bias is quite common where professional environments assume that maternal family role precludes desire for academic progression and visibility. Those are not deliberate acts, but a systemic pattern.
Working with mentors, women and minorities subjected to bias and discrimination can build confidence, navigate academic roads, develop skills and get professional and emotional support. But mentorship alone does not secure leadership nominations, ensure speaking invitations, guarantee advocacy in closed-door meetings or counterbalance network exclusion.
Very often the missing thing is sponsorship, which secures the nominations for section chief roles, protected research time, recommendations for national society committees, proposals for keynote speaking roles and support during chair selection processes. Without sponsorship, the glass ceiling remains intact.
A Power of Change
The hardest work in any organization is required to implement change. And everyone should take a part. Professionals aspiring for academic career should seek for multiple mentors for the different aspects of work and progress, learn to clearly articulate career ambitions, build peer networks and support groups. Women should accept visibility and high impact roles, not only lower positioned service, hoping for deserving more. However, responsibility cannot rest only on women and those in pursue for advancement. It should be shared with leaders and institutions and founded in audition of the leadership pipelines, track gender equity in nominations, formalise sponsorship programs, reward sponsors who recognize and develop talent and finally address bias.
Importantly, sponsorship should be transparent and grounded in merit. When leaders openly tell mentees “I have recommended you for this opportunity” they normalize advocacy as ethical responsibility of leadership and bring visibility to a process that is often hidden. Transparency helps ensure that advancement reflects competence, achievements, and objective evaluation rather than informal networks alone. When leaders actively champion talented colleagues, they do more than support individual career. They create a culture where excellence is recognized, and opportunity shared. In academic anaesthesiology this is the essence of “give it to gain”.
Cultivating a generation of educated and competent leaders, who see mentorship and sponsorship not as an optional, but as essential part of leadership, is the best way to secure bright future for our profession.
Vojislava Neskovic, MD, PhD, DEAA, FESAIC
Professor of anaesthesia and intensive care, Clinic for Anesthesia and Intensive care of the Military Medical Academy, Faculty of Medicine MMA, Belgrade, Serbia
Member of the WFSA DEI Committee and in-coming Chair.
Suggested Reading
- Rubulotta F. Advancing careers in critical care medicine: the power of sponsorship and mentorship. Lancet Respir Med. 2024 Feb;12(2):99-101. doi: 10.1016/S2213-2600(23)00425-3. Epub 2024 Jan 5. PMID: 38190835.
- Cutter CM, Griffith KA, Settles IH, Stewart AJ, Kerr EA, Feldman EL, Jagsi R. Gender Differences in Faculty Perceptions of Mentorship and Sponsorship. JAMA Netw Open. 2024 Feb 5;7(2):e2355663. doi: 10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2023.55663. PMID: 38345823; PMCID: PMC10862153.
- Gisselbaek M, Saxena S, Berger-Estilita J, Ateleanu B, Brazzi L, Buhre W, Crisan I, Camilleri-Podesta AM, Coburn M, Durnev V, Filipescu D, Ghezel-Ahmadi D, Golubovska I, Arévalo EG, Honorato-Cia C, Klimek M, Meco BC, Myatra SN, Nahtomi-Shick O, Neskovic V, O’Sullivan E, Rubulotta F, Romero C, Sabelnikovs O, Struys MM, Südy R, Weynants C, Ringvold EM, Matot I. ESAIC Mellin-Olsen declaration on diversity, equity and inclusion. Eur J Anaesthesiol. 2025 Jul 1;42(7):579-583. doi: 10.1097/EJA.0000000000002186. Epub 2025 May 2. PMID: 40314611.
- Stundner O, Adams MCB, Fronczek J, Kaura V, Li L, Allen ML, Vail EA. Academic anaesthesiology: a global perspective on training, support, and future development of early career researchers. Br J Anaesth. 2023 Nov;131(5):871-881. doi: 10.1016/j.bja.2023.07.030. Epub 2023 Sep 7. PMID: 37684165; PMCID: PMC10636519
- Neskovic V, Rubulotta F (eds). Diversity, Gender Equity and Inclusion in Critical Care and Perioperative Medicine. A New Guidance for Team Excellence. Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2025. ISBN 978-3-031-86285-4 ISBN 978-3-031-86286-1 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-86286-1
