Beating the Odds

Leadership lessons from senior African-American women by Laura Morgan Roberts, Anthony J. Mayo, Robin J. Ely and David A. Thomas

From the Magazine (March–April 2018)

Harvard Business Review Staff

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Any list of top CEOs reveals a startling lack of diversity. Among the leaders of Fortune 500 companies, for example, just 32 are women; with the recent departure of Ken Chenault from American Express, just three are African-American; and not one is an African-American woman. What’s going on?

Read more on Race or related topics Gender, Leadership development and Emotional intelligence

A version of this article appeared in the March–April 2018 issue of Harvard Business Review.

Laura Morgan Roberts is a Frank M. Sands Sr. Associate Professor of Business Administration at the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business. She is an organizational psychologist and the coeditor of Race, Work and Leadership: New Perspectives on the Black Experience (Harvard Business Review Press, 2019).

Anthony J. Mayo (tmayo@hbs.edu) is the Thomas S. Murphy Senior Lecturer of Business Administration in the Organizational Behavior unit of Harvard Business School.

Robin J. Ely is the Diane Doerge Wilson Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School and the faculty chair of the HBS Gender Initiative.

David A. Thomas is the president of Morehouse College. He is also the H. Naylor Fitzhugh Professor Emeritus at Harvard Business School and the former dean of Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business.

Beating the Odds

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