About Women’s Leadership Diaries

Using women’s stories, we are reframing the perception of “leader” to be inclusive of the daily experiences of diverse women and the guiding principles of influence, impact, change agency, and equity.

We invite you to watch the video below to learn more about the goals and intention behind this project from our Founding Director, Dr. Terri Boyer.

Introduction to the Women’s Leadership Diaries Project by Dr. Terri Boyer, Founding Director of the Anne Welsh McNulty Institute for Women’s Leadership

“When people think of women’s leadership as a term, it comes loaded with a number of preconceptions and bias. A lot of people feel it’s rooted in white feminism, that when we say woman leader we think of a certain person. Either a CEO of a corporation, or maybe somebody who’s in elected office, but there’s a lot more forms of leadership that encompass a much more diverse perspective of what is woman, and what is leadership. So, one of the things we want to do in collecting stories for the Women’s Leadership Diaries, is finding out from people in our communities, in our organizations, in our schools, in our businesses. What are some of the things women engage in on a daily basis that impact change, that affect those around them in a way that changes their world, their culture, their society, their organization, for the better? The Anne Welsh McNulty Institute for Women’s Leadership has as part of its mission, a theme that gender equity is important for the common good. That when women thrive, our families thrive, our children thrive, our economy thrives, and our culture and society thrives. And so, it’s not just about individual women and advancing them, it’s about making a better society, a better culture, a better school, a better community. Talking to allies will be an important way for us to understand why this is something that’s important to everyone in our society and culture and will move all of us forward. In the long term, what we hope the Women’s Leadership Diaries will do is reshape that term, leader, but in the short term what we hope to do is look at each of those tiny little daily experiences where we have to seek and find the leader in ourselves and perform leadership in a way that eventually leads us to become a leader. So, in looking at the stories that we’re looking at for the Women’s Leadership Diaries, we’re going to be focused on the little things that add up to become the big Leader.”

Guiding Principles

Our Institute is driven by four guiding principles. Read more about our guiding principles, how they relate to our mission and read diaries related to that each theme below.

Impact

Influence
Equity
Sophie Sandberg is pictured kneeling chalking on a bridge pedestrian path.
Change Agency