Final answer:
Mentoring is particularly important for women's career success, improving connections, reducing isolation, and overcoming job promotion discrimination. Same-gender or same-race mentorship can lead to enhanced psychosocial support, but cross-gender and cross-race mentorship often leads to greater career advancement for women and people of color.
Step-by-step explanation:
Research on mentoring has shown significant benefits for career success, particularly for women. Mentoring is known to help by creating connections to informal networks, reducing feelings of isolation, and helping overcome discrimination in job promotions. Studies, such as those by McKeen & Bujaki (2007), have emphasized the importance of mentorship for women's career advancement. Moreover, Allen, Eby, Poteet, Lentz, & Lima (2004) found that mentoring positively affects protégés' compensation and promotions compared with those without mentors. Additionally, Gentry, Weber, & Sadri (2008) found that mentoring is positively related to performance ratings by supervisors.
When it comes to the impact of gender and racial/ethnic makeup in mentor-mentee relationships, studies suggest that same-gender or same-race/ethnicity pairings may have better psychosocial outcomes. However, women and people of color were reported to experience greater career advancement or higher pay when mentored by people of a different gender or race/ethnicity (Parks-Yancy, 2012). Therefore, the answer to the student's question is that mentoring is D) more critical to women's career success than it is to men's.