As part of our celebration of Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) Heritage Month, we caught up with Rosalind M. Chow, Associate Professor of Organizational Behavior and Theory, to discuss her contributions to DEI&B thought leadership in the workplace, as well as her experiences as an Asian American female faculty member at the Tepper School.
When asked to provide her elevator pitch, Rosalind M. Chow, Associate Professor of Organizational Behavior and Theory at the Tepper School, laughed. "I have zero capability of doing elevator pitches and things like that," she happily, albeit sheepishly said, a feeling many of us can relate to. Within the next ten seconds, Chow launched into a critical, scholarly analysis of a recent article in a major news publication that misrepresented how many up-and-coming tech companies in Silicon Valley are owned or founded by Asian people, backing up her statements with statistics and research trends.
It turns out that you don't need an elevator pitch when your research speaks for itself.
Over the past few years, Chow has been working diligently at the Tepper School to become the face of social inequality research (such as racial and gender inequality). Her research focuses on hierarchy maintenance, inequality frames, individuals' status in team settings, and emotions and moral judgements. She has published a number of scholarly articles on white Americans' responses to racial inequality, and how members of dominant groups can contribute to the dismantling of systemic bias. More recently, her research focuses on promotion processes within organizations, with a specialization in sponsorship. This work has enriched her contributions to executive education, where she serves as the faculty director of the several Tepper School Executive Education DEI&B programs, including a partnership with Deloitte and the Fostering Organizational Equity (FORGE) leadership development program, and was the originating faculty director for the school's Executive Leadership Academy.
"If I had to say what I'd like to be known for, I would say I'd like to be…the person you can come to, to help problem-solve and learn more about sponsorship in the workplace," she said.
"What I mean by that is that I want to help people understand that they can be intentional in creating processes that work toward social equity. You can do this at an institutional level, but also a personal level. How do we create our social networks? How do we create relationships between people who may or may not be similar, in whatever dimension, and what are the specific things I can do to speak up as a sponsor? For those people and topics, I want to help."
