About Us
Leadership Edge is an initiative of SpeechSkills Foundation & Equality Action Center @ UC Law SF
Leadership Edge provides a sustained source of ongoing learning to help professionals at every level build confidence, strengthen their capabilities, and enhance their leadership potential.
Through monthly skill workouts with expert trainers, quarterly webinars, self-directed learning resources, and an extensive library of past programs, participants gain practical tools and fresh insights on topics such as leadership presence, business development, work-life integration, and navigating bias.
By providing consistent skill-building and development opportunities, membership gives organizations a meaningful and effective way to invest in emerging talent, support high performers, and develop future leaders from within.
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 11th 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.
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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.
Cara Hale Alter
Relying on 20 years of research, Cara has a deep understanding of how nonverbal communication shapes the perception of leadership presence. She literally wrote the book on projecting credibility and confidence: the critically acclaimed The Credibility Code. In workshops, she’s known for delivering precision feedback with warmth and humor. On stage, she’s an energetic and compelling presenter, having won numerous national awards for public speaking. With a BA in Speech Communication and an MFA in Theatre, Cara’s early career includes professional work as a voice-over artist and commercial actress.
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As the founder of SpeechSkills, Cara has provided training to some of the world’s best-known companies, including Caterpillar, Google, Meta, PayPal, Pixar, Samsung, Schwab, and Uber. In addition, she’s lectured at Harvard, Stanford, UCLA and UC Berkeley, worked with numerous top 100 law firms, and appeared in countless media outlets including Forbes.com and USA Today. An international keynote speaker, Cara has had the pleasure of speaking at more than 500 conferences, in 20 different countries.
As an advocate for diversity and inclusion, Cara has served on the board of the National Association of Women Business Owners and is currently featured on the Lean In website with her video series Taming Adrenaline.
When she’s not working, Cara enjoys hiking, yoga, and playing board games with her husband and two grown children in their hometown of San Francisco.
Chelsey Crowley
Chelsey Crowley brings more than a decade of experience developing leadership programs, managing high-profile events, and advancing mission-driven organizations. Since 2013, Chelsey has played an integral role in the development and management of Leadership Edge and the highly successful annual Leadership Academy for Women. Earlier in her career, Chelsey worked at UCLA’s Center for the Study of Women and interned with Home Street People’s Ministry, a grassroots organization in Salt River, South Africa, that supports young people and addresses hunger and poverty. She graduated magna cum laude from UCLA with a bachelor’s degree in political science.
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A woman of many talents, Chelsey balances her work in the nonprofit sector with her passion for music, performing and touring regularly. A proud Angeleno, she also enjoys hiking, reading, and running in her free time.