Catherine Tinsley

Catherine Tinsley, Ph.D., is a professor of management at Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business, Faculty Director of the Georgetown University Women’s Leadership Institute, Academic Director of Georgetown McDonough’s Executive Master’s in Leadership program, and a Senior Policy Scholar at the Georgetown Center for Business and Public Policy. Tinsley is an expert on gender intelligent leadership, gender parity and workforce development, negotiations, and decision making. For the past two years, she participated in The World Economic Forum’s annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland where she spoke about the role of confidence in women’s economic empowerment. In 2012 and 2013, she partnered with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce to study a decade of gender in the C-suite—researching how women fared relative to men in publicly traded companies from 2000-2010. She is currently doing field research with two Fortune 500 firms and one Fortune 100 firm, analyzing the implications of various corporate policies and structures for women’s advancement. Tinsley also has collaborated with the White House and U.S. State Department to execute a woman-to-woman mentorship summit and has partnered with the U.S. State Department and the Council of Women World Leaders to convene the first ever world-wide meeting of the Ministers of Women’s Affairs. She has won various academic rewards for her research. In addition to her research on gender dynamics in organizations, she studies how factors such as culture, reputations, and gender influence negotiation and conflict resolution. She also studies how people make decisions under risk, applying decision analytic frameworks to understand organizational disasters, and individual and expert responses to natural disasters (such as hurricanes) and man-made disasters (terrorist attacks). She received her Master’s and Ph.D. in Organizational Behavior from J.L. Kellogg Graduate School of Management at Northwestern University, and her BA in anthropology from Bryn Mawr College.