Leadership Profiles

“Sometimes in the more progressive places, they were very welcoming of women and might set them ahead to do certain kinds of things actually because we need a woman. On the other hand, there was still some resistance here and there...”

“ I was from the segregated south and you can see what happened to me in the south because I was in this closed community where I cam up where the whole is important to the individual, and then I came north and it was terrible.”

“I said, ‘Mr. President, you didn’t put on three Republicans and three Democrats, you put six fishermen on this report and we wrote it in the Land O’Lakes, Wisconsin after a terrific night of good fishing.’”

“That was the defining moment when I learned respect for all people…”

“I never, ever permit myself to be called a woman leader. I say no, I’m a leader who is a woman. My gender does not define my work.”

““[W]e knew what was going on was wrong, we were willing to take chances with our lives and anything else to change it.”

“[S]he looked at me and she said, ‘You are the most viable candidate, but you’re too old.’ I was just shocked.”

“[T]he right thing is possible.”

“I would say that nursing lived through that period where, you know, you had Ladies’ Home Journal articles about the nurse who delivers babies in Kentucky and, you know, real life people who were heroines and, and doing heroic things. The second wave of the women’s movement, which Friedan got going, was much more characterized by well, we got the vote, but there are all sorts of places where we are not now. And I am in no way critiquing that. I mean, that was true, there are places where women are not now.”

“When I became an Assistant Dean in the School of Medicine, I don’t think there were three women Deans in the United States.”

“[M]y mother and father taught us that, you know, take each person for who they are and so you don’t immediately think—you don’t go in with a chip on your shoulder, you don’t immediately think that this is going to be a hostile environment. You have to wait and see.”

“That’s one of the things that you have to do if you’re working with women in leadership, is to help them not go into that trap. You really have to encourage them that you need to find your own natural way, whatever that is, of connecting with people. You don’t have to give up your identity.”

“I think in the totalitarian approaches, the top down where there’s an understanding that it’s a vision that’s up there and that needs to be imposed, it’s not even motivated like in liberal societies, it’s imposed. It’s a construction of leadership for that particular society, and it works for those who believe in that way of doing things, but, in that context, leadership for what? It’s leadership for bad stuff, you know. And then there are movements, there are people on the ground saying, no, that’s not going to work. And that’s a reaction where leadership happens in a different way and for different purposes.”

“Before doing the work, the leadership work, the leadership research, I was very interested based on my dissertation work on issues of organizational justice, and obviously issues of race, gender, ethnicity come up. There was a lot of occupational segregation, and so the clerical career ladder that I was looking at mostly was women of color. And their salaries were completely deflated compared to the analysts.”

“I think I always did, but I thought of it as kind of under the table in a sense, behind the scenes. I did many things to annoy my male colleagues, not for the purpose of annoying them, but for the purpose of showing what their behavior was really like.”

“Yeah, absolutely divisive in families. And, as I said, you had students that were going to Canada, doing various things, as I said, to avoid being drafted for the Vietnam War, and what was happening generally. So, it was a hot time in the United States, definitely. ”

“Well, as I said, the workshops - the Urban League basically is, part of their mission is to not only seek fair and equitable employment, but also to involve people moving up, so to speak, in terms of their potential. ”