Kaira and the Big Pitch

An early-career engineer is passed over by the CEO of her firm for the lead role in delivering a pitch to a valuable external potential client.

The case can be used to help develop career skills that may be useful to achieving long-term success, such as:

• Building your professional support network for career resilience
• Communicating your impacts
• Managing conflict / Respectful confrontations
• Becoming a change agent in your organization
• Cultivating resilience in the face of adversity
• Forming alliances with other women
• Understanding meritocratic ideologies

Upon completion of this case, students will be able to:

• Recognize workplace gender bias.
• Recognize who your allies are in the workplace, and recognize who is not.
• Understand that the gender of the senior leadership does not automatically indicate whether they will support younger employees facing gender bias.
• Understand that collecting and sharing information is vital, as well as communicating that information to others in your organization.
• Understand the importance of communicating your impacts to others in your organization, both to your peer group and to middle and senior management.
• Understand that there may be complex relationships between gender issues a company can influence, and those it cannot.
• Understand the effects of gender bias in corporate culture.

• Becoming a change agent in your organization (Understanding Weed-out culture, Old-Boys Networks and Cloning)
• Building your professional support network for career resilience
• Communicating your impacts
• Cultivating resilience in the face of adversity
• Forming alliances with other women
• Managing conflict - Respectful confrontations
• Meritocratic ideologies