CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 InternationalAllin, LindaBoocock, EmmaO'Brien, Kate2025-03-062025-03-062025-03-20Allin, L., Boocock, E. and O’Brien, K. (2025) ‘The importance of trust in mentoring relationships for women’s outdoor leadership development’, Sport, Education and Society, pp. 1–13. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/13573322.2025.2478163.1357-3322https://eresearch.qmu.ac.uk/handle/20.500.12289/14187https://doi.org/10.1080/13573322.2025.2478163Linda Allin - ORCID: 0000-0002-8101-6631 https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8101-6631Item is restricted until 18 months after publication.Record updated to include VoR 24/03/2025.Mentoring is an important tool that organisations can implement to help address gender barriers in women’s progression in sport and the outdoors. However, there is much still to learn about what makes for effective mentoring in these contexts. This paper explores what makes for positive and ‘successful’ mentoring relationships within a formal mentoring programme for women’s outdoor leadership development. A qualitative, interpretive approach was adopted. Twenty participants who took part in a ten-week women’s outdoor leadership course and experienced mentoring by either a male or female mentor were interviewed using semi-structured interviews lasting 30-60 minutes. Transcripts were analysed through the framework of trust and trustworthiness (Hardin, 2002), paying attention to the significance of gender for cross-gender mentoring relationships. Findings show the importance of the key elements of openness and honesty, benevolence, reliability and competence for experiences of positive mentoring relationships and we highlight the issues raised when mentoring expectations are not met. The data reveal the value of both male and female mentors but also highlight the ambiguities and uncertainties for women in cross-gender mentoring. In particular, we show the importance of the mentoring relationship as a psychologically safe space where women’s experiences in the male dominated context of the outdoors can be understood, recognised and validated. Recommendations for mentoring programmes are provided.en© 2025 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way. The terms on which this article has been published allow the posting of the Accepted Manuscript in a repository by the author(s) or with their consent.http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/MentoringOutdoor LeadershipWomenTrustGenderArticle