7 Roundtable on the Future of Women's Leadership

Even as I concluded writing this book, a set of urgent questions remained concerning the future of leadership for women in the twenty-first century. To further explore these questions and concerns, I asked four women leaders to come together to discuss what the future holds for women in leadership. To ensure that a range of perspectives would be represented, I reached out to women in several key sectors discussed throughout the book: Laura Mosqueda, a physician, educator, and the former dean of the Keck School of Medicine at the University of Southern California; Fiona Ma, a politician and California's state treasurer; Chief RaShall Brackney, a veteran law enforcement professional and the former chief of police for Charlottesville, Virginia; and Yasmin Beers, a management consultant and the former city manager of Glendale, California. Collectively, the women in the roundtable have experience working in the private sector, health care, higher education, local and state government, and law enforcement. They also all happen to belong to one or more racial and ethnic minorities. Since millennials (individuals born between the early 1980s and the mid-1990s) and Generation Z (individuals born between the mid-1990s and early 2010s) are the most racially and ethnically diverse generations ever to enter the workforce, it felt particularly important to assemble a group of women leaders who were able to speak professionally and personally to the interacting issues of gender, race, and ethnicity.