Document Type
Article
Publication Date
2020
Abstract
Over the course of six months, the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School’s class “Women, Law, and Leadership” interviewed 55 women between the ages of 25 and 85, all leaders in their respective fields. Nearly half of the women interviewed were women of color, and 10 of the women lived and worked in countries other than the U.S., spanning across Europe, Africa, and Southeast Asia. Threading together the common themes touched upon in these conversations, we gleaned a number of novel insights, distinguishing the leadership trajectories pursued by women who have risen to the heights of their professions. Through thousands of hours of conversation with some of the world’s most influential and powerful women, this study identifies the primary barriers and biases faced by women of diverse backgrounds in the workplace, as well as the strategies and philosophies they adopted in order to overcome these impediments. While there is much commonality among the women’s experiences, women of color often face more pervasive and subtle barriers than their white counterparts. Their leadership strategies on how to address these insidious challenges, however, are rarely recorded. In this article, we give voice to these experiences.
Keywords
Women & leadership, sex/gender discrimination in employment, promotion, inequality, empirical cross-cultural studies, comparative law & politics, race, intersectionality
Publication Title
Virginia Journal of Social Policy & Law
Repository Citation
de Silva de Alwis, Rangita; Heberlig, Sarah; and Holcomb, Lindsay, "Dismantling “Dilemmas of Difference” in the Workplace" (2020). All Faculty Scholarship. 2243.
https://scholarship.law.upenn.edu/faculty_scholarship/2243
Included in
Civil Rights and Discrimination Commons, Comparative and Foreign Law Commons, Comparative Politics Commons, Gender and Sexuality Commons, Human Rights Law Commons, Inequality and Stratification Commons, Labor and Employment Law Commons, Law and Gender Commons, Law and Society Commons, Leadership Studies Commons, Politics and Social Change Commons, Public Law and Legal Theory Commons, Social and Cultural Anthropology Commons, Women's Studies Commons, Work, Economy and Organizations Commons
Publication Citation
27 Va. J. Soc. Pol'y & L. 193 (2020)