Approach

The Center for Gender, Equity, and Leadership will leverage the Berkeley Haas Four Defining Leadership Principles to drive change in powerful ways.

The center will focus on:

1. Convening female leaders from the political and business sectors and creating a dialogue around issues of women's empowerment and advancement.
2. Targeting the specific challenges of mid-stage career women—the drop-off rate for women on route to upper leadership tracks increases significantly at mid-career stages.
3. Engaging male and female allies and uniting people of all ethnicities, races and classes around a shared goal of gender equality.
4. Developing Haas leaders who understand gender as a spectrum, not as a binary construct ascribed at birth and who recognize that this requires new kinds of leadership, policies, and organizations.
5. Conducting field research to investigate various ways in which women across geographies, sectors, industry and levels exert power and influence, and how that differs from men.
6. Converting research-based insights into effective business strategies to reduce inequities and develop diversity-intelligent strategies for leadership.

Approach:

• Innovation: The center will enable safe discourse, debate, and experimentation in thought, values, and experience to cultivate innovative and disruptive solutions.
• Acceleration: The center will leverage existing research to provide a roadmap for change and bring together leading faculty in and beyond the UC Berkeley campus to forward the mission.
• Leadership Identity: The center will focus on women as well as societal notions of manhood. Scholarship and practice around masculinity and the challenges that men experience play a significant role.