Just Five Questions: Becca Constantine ’19

Becca Constantine is an expert in leadership training with a focus on driving effective, inclusive, and ethical leadership and organizational practices. She is the founder of a boutique strategy and inclusion consulting firm. Previously she held a range of leadership roles at Stanford University’s Women’s Leadership Innovation Lab and in AmeriCorps. Becca is the Yale SOM Women’s Circles global facilitator and a leader of the Women in Management Affinity Group. She is a longtime champion of urban education and community partnerships, including during her tenure as a team leader for a FEMA national disaster response team. 

Q1: What’s a global trend you are following where you see an opportunity or bright spot in this challenging macro environment?

We’re seeing a vast range of innovations in leadership and inclusion training that have impacts across industries and workforces. I’m paying particularly close attention to the accelerating economic impact of women that is unfolding at the same time as corporations are making major cuts to inclusion-focused efforts.

On a positive note, we’re seeing highly skilled, highly dynamic women leading in a range of spheres. Consider Taylor Swift and Beyoncé: the economic impact of their work resonates internationally. Their results underscore the ability of women leaders to positively impact global economies and multiple industries, which is counter to our existing norm of celebrating small improvements in the percentage of women advancing to the C-suite.

And yet we’re also seeing conversations that ask: Is DEI still relevant? Should we still put money into it? The real question is: When we don’t see the impact of DEI efforts, are those efforts truly not having a positive impact or are we simply measuring the wrong thing? Most often, it’s the latter.

Too often, we throw up our hands because we haven’t solved the hiring and promotion gaps that exist across industries in a handful of years. Yet we haven’t given our teams the time, resources, and autonomy in implementing DEI solutions to be successful. We need to re-evaluate how we support and incentivize each team to embed DEI processes within that team’s approach, how we provide employees with the time, bandwidth, and resources to implement those processes, and how we assess outcomes within teams and across the organization.

It’s easy to say, “advancing women matters to us” and come up with some quantitative metrics that a central DEI team is held to as it seeks to shift organizational culture. It’s much harder to give all of our teams a framework for reducing bias that they can adapt to their area then hold them accountable for delivering outcomes that we measure through both quantitative and qualitative metrics. We need to reframe the DEI conversation to focus on giving exceptional leaders across our organizations the frameworks, processes, and timelines that enable them to advance inclusion and reduce bias to unlock the economic growth and innovation driven by a diverse and inclusive workforce. This is how exceptional companies thrive.

Beyond women’s leadership, we can return to Taylor and Beyoncé to look at how we’re supporting our early-career employees. I see young people, starting with students in middle and high school on TikTok and Instagram, driving the conversation around how they want to be supported, using the empowerment they feel from and the words they hear from great women artists to express that. But young people are also embracing a broader definition of femininity and gender roles, in addition to other aspects of identity, than generations past. Does Taylor Swift, who’s cultivated her fame for decades, seem more accessible because she appears strongly feminine? Is her unstoppable ability to get her message across supported by seeming non-threatening in a sparkly leotard and tights, modeling an image of femininity that existed decades before she was born?

I love that we’re seeing young people embrace both that older image of femininity and others. Taylor Swift can rock colorful friendship bracelets and be great. Billie Eilish can wear baggy clothing and also be great. Young people are recognizing how artists show up and celebrating artists who dress and perform in a range of gender-coded ways.

Conversely, in corporate settings, we’re still seeing women held to a narrow definition of femininity. Women, research finds, are too often perceived as either likable or competent but not both — the Likeability-Competence Penalty. Men are still rewarded with promotions for fatherhood while women are penalized for motherhood. How do we mirror the learnings of both research and our younger generations entering the workforce to structure corporate processes in ways that remove the impacts of bias around gender orientation and more?

Every generation gets into the workplace and has observations and thoughts for change. We’ve already seen Gen Z express that their ideas are not taken seriously in the workplace. It can be too easy to say, “Oh, every generation does that. We got ignored too. Gen Z is just the generation that wants to have meaning in work and is always taking mental health days.” Yes, members of Gen Z, a population of about 90 million, are more vocal about the need for mental health awareness in workplaces. This is a generation that we trained from a young age to see the world as a scary place. We’d send them to school and have them practice school shooter drills, signaling that even their own schools weren’t safe. Further, most of them have had access to global news in a way no generation before did. When there were three cable networks and one local newspaper, the world out there was a bit scary. When there’s a constant stream of war and fear and famine and, yes, school shootings, then it’s entirely understandable that these employees are asking to work from home at times or taking mental health days. Companies that understand this reality will excel by allowing more flexibility in office presence and providing clear mental health supports.

Being an exceptional leader doesn’t mean having a shiny job title. There are exceptional leaders who are classroom teachers and there are CEOs who have a broad leadership domain but aren’t exceptional in their oversight of it. There’s a lot of work still to do within corporations in advancing and listening to our people regardless of job title or gender identity. There’s a lot to celebrate in how young people are already leading.

Q2: What’s an example of how SOM’s mission informed your professional path?

SOM is this wonderful collection of humans with exceptional and kind faculty.

Absolutely, if you have Yale SOM on your resume, that unlocks a certain level of opportunity. What’s more important to me is what SOM offers as a community, who I got to be around and learn from in the classroom, and how that richly wonderful community continues to be a huge part of my life now.

The ability to stay connected to other alumni in ways that are so far beyond the superficial is impactful. Even after graduation, we still have our alumni community for late-night dives into the societal ramifications and ethical impacts of any decision. SOM remains incredible years beyond Evans Hall.

Q3: What’s an SOM experience that helped shape the way you understand business and society?

A favorite was Professor Mushfiq Mobarak’s State & Society course. We studied the gender wage gap, racial inequality and redlining in housing, and more. Understanding these dynamics is foundational to knowing what it means to lead in a way that drives both economic growth and social impact. Having these discussions in a community as diverse and inclusive as SOM gave me the experience to influence corporate and board discussions on what it means for an organization to focus on DEI as well as when and why companies should focus on DEI. If you’re a startup founder with two co-founders, when should you start thinking about DEI in your company? If you’re the CEO of a Fortune 100 company, why and how should you embed it throughout your practices? In classroom conversations at SOM, you understand the full diversity of perspectives, which is a huge advantage in driving progress.

Q4: What’s a favorite SOM memory, faculty member, mentor, or class?

A favorite classroom experience was being a TA for Economics. One of the other TAs and I were leading a review session for the final exam when a student asked: “Can we go over an example on international trade?” The other TA said, “Becca, you take this one!” He had a stronger background in Economics, while I had a stronger background in teaching. Here I was, knowing only so much about global trade, attempting to talk 170 students through a review question I hadn’t written. So, I took the educator approach and asked a series of open-ended questions, watching for student reactions: “How would you approach this?” “Oh, I think there might be some disagreement, what do you think?” “Does that solution make sense to folks?” Within five minutes, we had a crowd-sourced answer to the question that both was correct and made the students more confident in their understanding of the economics of trade. It reminded me how much of leading—as of life — is not about knowing the answer but about being willing to listen to those who do and filtering for the truth in the responses you get.

Beyond Evans Hall, I loved the many gatherings and conversations about values. During Orientation, three of us first-years ended up in a canoe together on a lake. We had a conversation around values in that canoe that evolved into two years of monthly small-group gatherings about integrating our personal values with what we were learning in our classes and how we want to show up in the world as humans and as leaders.

Q5: What are you excited about for the year ahead?

Professionally, I’m partnering with SOM’s Alumni Relations team to launch two new locations for our SOM Alumni Women’s Circles. I love to gather with our alumni community to dive into advancing women’s leadership and watch our amazing alums connect with each other.

Personally, now that I live in Massachusetts after years in California, I’m excited to experience seasons again!

Fun Fact: This summer, I biked across the United States from Lubec, Maine, to Cape Alava, Washington. The 4,516-mile ride took 83 days. It was so much fun and a wonderful way to see the country. I realized just how big Montana really is and unexpectedly loved riding through the cornfields of Indiana.

Favorite Books: A Hope in the Unseen by Ron Suskind

How to reach me on LinkedIn.

Just Five Questions is an initiative led by the Yale SOM Alumni Advisory Board. Want to learn more? Contact Lee Race ’93 with feedback, thoughts, and/or questions.