About Us

Women's Leadership Edge

Women’s Leadership Edge is a membership program for orgs that strive to level the playing field by addressing the structures that contribute to bias. Programming includes leadership training, professional skill building, and action-oriented conversations around race, gender and first-generation professionals in the workplace.

Members receive org-wide access to training and resources that are useful tools not only for members of underrepresented groups but also for sponsors, mentors, professional development directors and org leaders looking for sustained support as they reshape systems and culture at the organizational level for long term success.

OUR TEAM

Joan C. Williams

Described as having “something approaching rock star status” in her field by The New York Times Magazine, Joan C. Williams is a scholar of social inequality and a prominent public intellectual. Williams is the author of 12 books and 116 academic articles in law, sociology, psychology, medical and management journals. She is the 11^th most cited legal scholar both in critical theory and employment law. She is a Sullivan Professor and the Founding Director of the Equality Action Center at UC Law San Francisco, former Founding Director of the Center for WorkLife Law.

She has three TED/TEDx talks, including one with over 1.3 million views. Her 2016 essay on why Trump attracted so many non-college voters went viral, with over 3.7 million reads, becoming the most-read article in the 90-year history of Harvard Business Review. She is widely known for “bias interrupters,”—an evidence-based metrics-driven approach to eradicating implicit bias introduced in the Harvard Business Review in 2014. The website biasinterrupters.org with open-sourced toolkits for individuals and organizations has been accessed over 500,000 times. She was profiled in Financial Times and has published on class dynamics in American politics in The New York Times, Washington Post, The Atlantic, The New Republic, Politico, The Hill, the Wall Street Journal and elsewhere.

Her work on class includes her upcoming book Outclassed: How the Left Lost the Working Class – And How to Win Them Back (forthcoming St. Martin’s, May 2025) and her critically acclaimed 2017 book White Working Class – one of three books President Biden carried, dog-eared and annotated, during his 2020 presidential campaign, according to the Washington Post.

Her work on gender includes What Works for Women at Work: Four Patterns Working Women Need to Know (NYU Press, 2014) and her prize-winning Unbending Gender: Why Family and Work Conflict and What To Do About It (Oxford, 1999). Williams’ work helped create the field of work-family studies, modern workplace flexibility policies, and the study of maternal wall bias in sociology.

Her work on race includes eight studies documenting how racial and gender bias play out in today’s workplaces, including two focused specifically on women of color: Pinning down the Jellyfish: Racial and Gender Bias against Women in Tech (2022) and Double Jeopardy? Gender Bias against Women of Color in STEM (2014). She is a leading voice on diversity, equity, and inclusion; with her team, she has published 39 articles published in Harvard Business Review. In 2014, she launched Bias Interrupters, a data-driven approach to interrupting bias in organizations whose website has been downloaded over half a million times.

Williams has received awards in several different fields. For her contributions to the legal profession, she is one of the few people to receive both the American Bar Foundation’s Outstanding Scholar Award (2012) and the ABA’s Margaret Brent Women Award for Lawyers of Achievement (2006). For her contributions to the work-family field, she received the Work Life Legacy Award from the Families and Work Institute (2014) and MSOM Responsible Research Award in Operations Management (2022). For her contributions to women’s advancement in engineering, she received the President’s Award from the Society of Women Engineers (2019). For contributions to psychology, she received the Distinguished Publication Award from the Association for Women in Psychology (2005).

Her work has been funded by three National Science Foundation grants, as well as grants from Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the W. W. Kellogg Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. She holds degrees from Yale, Harvard, and MIT as well as an honorary PhD from Utrecht University in the Netherlands.

Jamie Dolkas

Jamie Dolkas (she/her) is Equality Action Center’s SVP of Strategy and Research and an Adjunct Law Professor at UC College of the Law, San Francisco. Jamie is an attorney specializing in employment and civil rights law, with a focus on sex discrimination in employment and education. She leads Equality Action Center’s women’s leadership initiatives, including Hastings Leadership Academy for Women and Women’s Leadership Edge. She also teaches a Leadership for Lawyers course at UC Law SF with Professor Joan Williams, a professional skills course that gives law students tools for career success.

Prior to joining Equality Action Center, Jamie was a Staff Attorney at Equal Rights Advocates (ERA), a national civil rights organization dedicated to advancing gender equity in education and employment, where her practice focused on sex discrimination litigation, best practices training, and legislative advocacy.

Jamie has written several publications, including Expecting A Baby, Not A Lay-Off: Why Federal Law Should Require the Reasonable Accommodation of Pregnant Workers (ERA 2012), and a chapter in the anthology, The Opt Out Revolution Revisited (WorkLife Law 2012), which she co-authored with Professor Joan Williams. Jamie graduated with highest honors from the University of California, Berkeley, and cum laude from the University of California College of the Law, San Francisco. She also completed the Women’s Policy Institute, a year-long legislative advocacy training program for women leaders.

Chelsey Crowley

Program Manager

Henrique Ferreira Menezes

Program Associate

Ryan Malek-Maple