Duke University scholar Ashleigh Shelby Rosette makes the concept of diversity relevant to everyone — beyond the parameters of race and gender.
“Most people can think of a time when they felt different. Diversity is simply differences among people,” Rosette said in a 2017 interview. “If you can get people to recall their own feelings about being different, it can then help them to be more sensitive to other people’s feelings about diversity. Everyone has something. So you have to figure out what their ‘something’ is.”
A native of Jasper, Texas, Rosette studies the interplay of leadership, gender and race.
She’s also an acclaimed professor at the Fuqua School of Business, where she has won the Excellence in Teaching Award 12 times in 13 years.
Rosette is listed as one of the nation’s 50 Most Influential Business Professors by mbarankings.net, and ranked as one of the Favorite Professors of the MBA Class of 2019, by Poets & Quants. She has authored more than 30 research articles centering on diverse leadership and negotiations. Her findings have been featured in some of the nation’s top media outlets.
In 2023, Rosette co-authored a study in the Journal of Applied Psychology that found there are instances when women are better negotiators than men. Specifically, Rosette and her co-authors found that women may be better than men at preventing negotiations from stalling.
Rosette has said everyone should be pointing out the diversity issues, not just diversity scholars.
“We need everyone to be that person who is pointing it out, she said in 2018, after creating a Women in Leadership course at Fuqua. “I want the man sitting on my right to be raising the same gender-related questions as the woman to my left.”
