The Women’s Resource Center is planning a free mentoring conference, called Women Mentoring Women, at the University Union that will help female students on campus learn leadership and career development skills from successful women in the community.

Patricia Grady, the Women’s Resource Center coordinator, said the conference has been put together with the efforts of several women from academic affairs, student affairs and the office of President Alexander Gonzalez.

Grady said there will be approximately 50 women working in a variety of fields, including the arts, business, education, politics, sciences, social services and sports, from around the greater Sacramento area at the conference volunteering as mentors.

Grady said that Gloria Gonzalez, the wife of President Alexander Gonzalez, was one of the people who first thought of having this event at Sacramento State.

Gonzalez said, “Linda Buckley and I sat next to each other at a dinner and we began talking about a similar event that I had attended at San Marcos, and I was surprised when I heard that there had never been a women’s conference at the Sacramento campus. That’s what got us thinking about it.”

Gonzalez said that after that dinner, one and a half years ago, she began working with Linda Buckley, director of curriculum assessment and accreditation for academic affairs, Lori Varlotta, vice president of student affairs, and the Women’s Resource Center to get the conference together.

Gonzalez, who is a mentor herself, said she thinks the mentoring at this conference is important for women because, “there is nothing more powerful that the human connections we make…”

“There is a lot of negative publicity about women’s relationship with each other … this conference will hopefully counter the stereotype in the media about how women feel about each other,” Gonzalez said.

Buckley said her involvement stemmed from the same type of feeling and that she was not surprised that most of the women who were asked to be mentors were eager to get involved.

“Women are pretty generous about this type of thing. Many of them have had a hard time coming up (in their professions) and they know how difficult it can be for young women and how important networking can be to success,” Buckley said.

She said that there will be women CEOs, FBI agents, legislative analysts and other women business leaders in attendance.

Grady said that because these women are busy people she doesn’t expect all of them to keep an ongoing relationship, but that she hopes relationships made at the conference will be lasting.

Each mentor has been asked to schedule at least one other event during March, Grady said, which is also Women’s History Month, to get together and do something fun to keep the mentoring relationship going after the conference.

Grady said the conference is an all day event scheduled for March 4 and that students can register online at www.csus.edu/wrc. When students register they will be asked what their career goals are and what their major is so that they can be appropriately paired with a mentor, she said.

“Much of the success women have had comes from supporting each other; mentoring is just another way to do that,” Grady said.