Research Overview

The VMware Women's Leadership Innovation Lab bridges the gap between research and practice to drive meaningful change for women's leadership in academia, government, and workplaces. We combine basic and applied research to diagnose barriers to change, pilot innovative solutions, and serve as a partnership hub connecting industry, academia, and beyond. Our mission is to advance women's leadership across all dimensions of difference, life stages, and organizational contexts.

As sociologists, we know that some of the most important barriers to advancing women’s leadership are structural in nature, such as when gender and racial biases get built into evaluation systems. In our work, we examine pivotal moments in women’s careers - from leadership identity and skill development in adolescence and emerging adulthood, through professional entry and early career navigation, to accessing critical assignments and advancing into senior leadership roles - and examine the ways bias can be embedded in everyday interactions, structures, and processes. A central goal of our work is to not just better understand barriers to women’s advancement but to also translate research into actionable solutions that create lasting social change.

At the core of this work is a fundamental question: How do you create sustainable change? Addressing this question requires articulating a theory of change - a clear, empirically testable path from scholarly insight to real-world impact. The Lab has been designing and testing a theory of change for reducing gender bias in organizations for the past decade, which is central to our research agenda and mission of creating impact. 

Our "small wins" model for reducing gender bias in organizations

Text Description of Small Wins Model

A key feature of our approach is to partner with organizational change agents to integrate academic knowledge, practitioner knowledge, and knowledge of the lived experience from people on the ground when diagnosing problems and designing and testing solutions. The “small wins” that result motivate further action and are the building blocks to larger organizational change.  

Learn more about theory of change