The woman who first encouraged my career as a writer spent the early months of our acquaintance telling me to shut up. She did this because I was constantly chatting with my desk buddy during class. I was 8. But after she read a short-story assignment, she enrolled me in her advanced writing class - my first promotion.
I was reminded of my former teacher when I saw the film poster for The Blind Side , which hits theatres today. It shows a bleached-blond Sandra Bullock walking beside a young football player, her arm supportively resting on his hulking back.
Watching the preview, I got the gist of this true story of NFL football player Michael Oher: A woman persuades her husband to take in a disadvantaged youth, and she becomes like a mother to him, teaching him to be tough, to stand up for himself and, as they say, to man up.
It got me thinking about the women in my life as I came of age, and I realized that I learned many of the traits usually associated with manliness from female role models and mentors. You could say it was women that made me the man I am.
My first job after university was in public relations, and my boss was a woman. She left me mostly alone to do my work, but after a few months she called me in to her office and told me bluntly that I lacked assertiveness.
"Stop talking to the floor," she said, or something to that effect. I nodded and went back to my desk to pout.
But her castigation, as well as further coaching, taught me important work and life skills, such as not being an insipid pushover.
Now, I know that calling assertiveness a manly trait is a sexist statement. But the fact is, if you are a man it's a quality you're supposed to possess. For a man not to be able to confidently express himself is viewed as not being a man at all.
In turn, you'd assume this would be a quality best learned from a male mentor. However, according to Robin Church, an assistant professor at Ryerson University who studies gender and mentorship, a woman may actually be the best person in the workplace to teach this lesson.
"Historically, we've had expectations that men are more naturally assertive than women," Dr. Church says. "And so a woman who's had to undo some of her social programming and become more assertive in the workplace may be better suited to teach somebody else how to do that than somebody who's always been that way and would just think, 'Why can't he do this?'"
Dr. Church says women mentors can be useful for men in general, but the surplus of men at higher organizational levels still makes male mentors more sought after by people aiming for a top position.
Among the Fortune 1000 companies, only 25 in 2008 were headed by a woman, one fewer than the year before. This gender disparity presents a mentorship problem, Dr. Church points out, because mentors tend to take on protégés who remind them of themselves, and vice versa.
Dr. Church says a gradual shift is occurring. "Younger men now might identify more with an older women than an older man, because he may see an older man as being a dinosaur," he says, explaining that a guy who came of age in the fifties might have outdated ideas about gender versatility and thus could actually stunt a younger man's social intelligence. "So now a young man might see past the surface," Dr. Church says. "He looks at a woman and might see things inside her that he wants to emulate."
My father, a psychologist, focused a lot on what lies beneath the surface. So when, at 15, I met the woman who would become his second wife, I tried to impress her by talking about how gender didn't matter and how we were all equal.
She then asked me what I was going to do about it. "Do?" I replied. Wasn't expanding my consciousness while getting high in my bedroom enough?
A couple of weeks later, she said she was taking me somewhere, and I ended up at an abortion clinic as one link in a human wall protecting patients and doctors from protesters.
In addition to assertive, you always hear that men are supposed to be "action-oriented." But looking back, I think there's no better person I could've learned the importance of taking social action from than a woman who came of age in the sixties and seventies.
In fact, for men of my generation and younger who want to learn how to fight - whether it's on the football field, in the boardroom or on Parliament Hill - a woman just might be the best person to teach them.
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