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Sustainable fashion leadership: The female phenomenon
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Sustainable fashion leadership: The female phenomenon
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Content
Sustainable Fashion Leadership: The Female Phenomenon
by
Amelia B. Williams
Rossier School of Education
University of Southern California
A dissertation submitted to the faculty
in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of
Doctor of Education
May 2022
© Copyright by Amelia B. Williams 2022
All Rights Reserved
The Committee for Amelia B. Williams certifies the approval of this Dissertation
Anthony Maddox
Brandon Martinez
Monique Datta, Committee Chair
Rossier School of Education
University of Southern California
2022
iv
Abstract
Women are leading the sustainability movement in the fashion industry by challenging
traditional practice expectations and championing practice change. This study investigates the
phenomenon of the sustainable fashion movement’s female leaders and the variables that led
them to step forward as industry change agents. The global fashion industry generates $3.2
trillion dollars in annual revenue, employs 60 million people, and generates over 45 million tons
of textile waste each year. The feminized industry is dominated by male leadership that oversees
and directs female employee followership from the factory floor to the design studio and runway.
The fashion industry’s global behaviors are harming the planet and constricting the employment
opportunities for its female population. The sustainability movement confronts the status quo by
pushing against traditional industry practices. Women are challenging practice norms and career
expectations by advancing fashion’s sustainability movement. Social role theory is the
theoretical framework underpinning this phenomenological field study investigating the gender
barriers, social role expectations, and personality traits that have led to sustainable fashion’s
female leadership.
Keywords: fashion industry, female leadership, sustainable fashion, gender bias, social role
theory
v
Dedication
To the women who dreamed in fabric, who made beautiful and wearable clothes, and whose love
for fashion materialized because of their hard work, impeccable taste, and superior skills. Thank
you for sharing your fashion love and for encouraging me to follow my fashion dream. My
teachers: MaryAnne Knight, Pud Kearns, Christine DeGennaro, and Dee Cohen. My
grandmothers: role models of persistence in a world that did not acknowledge their strength,
brilliance, or capability. Amelia and Ruth. Your real-life adventures are my foundation. Your
tenacity is woven into our family lore, your lived tales defined your truths, and your integrity
defined your beings. Your strength colored the generations of daughters that followed.
To my daughters, Lily Hawkins and Paige Billings. You face life with creativity, enthusiasm,
and determination. You are my inspiration for creating a better world.
vi
Acknowledgments
This study is born from a love of fashion, a career spent in its trenches, and the
willingness to investigate an industry’s global practices. The study required guidance from those
who knew more and persistence from those willing to bring change.
To my USC family, who encouraged me to share an industry’s reality: Dr. Monique
Datta, I am forever grateful for your push. Dr. Anthony Maddox, and Dr. Brandon Martinez
thank you for reading between all the lines. Dissertating takes an OCL village: Dr. Alexandra
Wilcox. Dr. Mary Ho, Dr. Adam Kho, Dr. Douglas Lynch, and Dr. Marcus Pritchard, thank you
for your lessons. Finally, to my friends of Cohort 15 and TeamSew’s Natalie Salvador and Joe
Essex, thank you for linking arms as we raced forward.
To the brave women leaders of sustainable fashion: Thank you for telling your truths.
You have made the differences our industry has needed by leading the charge. I am honored to
know you. I am cheering for each of you and for all of us.
To my Bozeman Deaconess team, who helped me face fear, chemistry, and time, my
gratitude for your kindness comes from my heart and my whole being. To my treasured friends
whose brilliant brains, kind hearts, and wicked senses of humor kept me on the right path. You
dared me to go on this adventure, and you cheered as I navigated the maze.
To my dearest partner in all things: Brandt Williams. Thank you for all of the meals, the
drives, the tech support, and the hours you spent reading. To my precious daughters, you inspire
me daily. I am so proud to be your momma.
There are no conflicts of interest to disclose.
Correspondence concerning this dissertation can be addressed to Amelia Williams, P.O.
Box 69, Ennis, MT, 59729. Email: ameliawi@usc.edu
vii
Table of Contents
Abstract .......................................................................................................................................... iv
Dedication ....................................................................................................................................... v
Acknowledgments .......................................................................................................................... vi
Table of Contents .......................................................................................................................... vii
List of Tables .................................................................................................................................. x
List of Figures ................................................................................................................................ xi
Chapter One: Introduction to the Study .......................................................................................... 1
Context and Background of the Problem .......................................................................... 1
Purpose of the Project and Research Questions ................................................................ 3
Importance of the Study .................................................................................................... 3
Overview of Theoretical Framework and Methodology ................................................... 5
Definition of Terms ........................................................................................................... 6
Organization of the Study ................................................................................................ 11
Chapter Two: Review of the Literature ........................................................................................ 12
Fashion’s Traditional Vortex ........................................................................................... 12
Gender Beliefs and Behaviors ......................................................................................... 28
Sustainability: Reforming Social Roles .......................................................................... 35
Conceptual Framework ................................................................................................... 44
Conclusion ....................................................................................................................... 47
Chapter Three: Methodology ........................................................................................................ 49
Research Questions ......................................................................................................... 49
viii
Overview of Design ......................................................................................................... 49
Research Setting .............................................................................................................. 50
The Researcher ................................................................................................................ 51
Data Sources .................................................................................................................... 52
Participants ...................................................................................................................... 53
Instrumentation ................................................................................................................ 54
Data Collection Procedures ............................................................................................. 55
Data Analysis .................................................................................................................. 56
Interview Method ............................................................................................................ 57
Validity and Reliability ................................................................................................... 58
Ethics ............................................................................................................................... 58
Summary ......................................................................................................................... 60
Chapter Four: Findings ................................................................................................................. 61
Data Collection and Analysis .......................................................................................... 61
Description of the Participants ........................................................................................ 64
Findings Research Question 1 Sustainable Fashion's Female Leadership ...................... 66
Discussion Research Question 1 ..................................................................................... 79
Findings Research Question 2: Factors for Navigating Change ..................................... 80
Discussion Research Question 2 ..................................................................................... 93
Findings Research Question 3: Engaged Role Modeling for Sustainable Fashion ......... 94
Discussion Research Question 3 ................................................................................... 104
Summary of Findings .................................................................................................... 105
Chapter Five: Recommendations and Discussion ....................................................................... 107
ix
Discussion of Findings .................................................................................................. 107
Recommendations for Practice ...................................................................................... 110
Limitations and Delimitations ....................................................................................... 118
Recommendations for Future Research ........................................................................ 119
Gender Equity Connection to the Rossier Mission ....................................................... 121
Conclusion for Sustainable Fashion’s Female Leadership ............................................ 122
References ................................................................................................................................... 124
Appendix A: Interview Protocol ................................................................................................. 144
x
List of Tables
Table 1: Participants: Pseudonyms, Personality Traits, Titles/Organization, Sectors, and
Descriptive Words ......................................................................................................................... 65
Table 2: Research Question 1 Subthemes: Female Leadership .................................................... 66
Table 3: Participant Quotes: Men Versus Women ......................................................................... 67
Table 4: Participant Quotes: The Ah-Ha Moments ....................................................................... 79
Table 5: Research Question 2 Subthemes: Factors for Navigating Change ................................. 80
Table 6: Participant Quotes: Collaboration, Partnerships, and Teamwork ................................... 84
Table 7: Research Question 3 Subthemes: Engaged Role Modeling ............................................ 95
Table 8: Sustainability Society Trainings and Workshops .......................................................... 117
Table9A1: Interview Protocol ..................................................................................................... 146
xi
List of Figures
Figure 1: Conceptual Framework ................................................................................................. 47
Figure 2: Research Themes ........................................................................................................... 62
Figure 3: Recommendations for a Responsible Fashion Industry .............................................. 112
xii
List of Abbreviations
AI Artificial Intelligence
BOF Business of Fashion
CFDA Council of Fashion Designers of America
CSO Chief Sustainability Officer and Chief Strategy Officer
CSR Corporate Social Responsibility
EPA Environmental Protection Agency
LCA Life Cycle Analysis
SRT Social Role Theory
TBL Triple Bottom Line
WWD Women’s Wear Daily
1
Chapter One: Introduction to the Study
The systematic marginalization of women pervades the feminized male-dominated
fashion industry’s factory floors, design studios, and creative design C-suites. The industry’s
preference for creative male leadership (Brown et al., 2018; Stokes, 2017) sits in stark contrast to
sustainable fashion’s expansive female leadership (Roshitsh, 2019). Limited by their gender and
not their skills (Clark, 2012; Friedman, 2015; Miller, 2016; Stokes, 2015), female fashion
designers and entrepreneurs create change by challenging the status quo of fashion’s traditional
product development systems (Roshitsh, 2019). By working outside of the conventional industry
practices and taking up fashion sustainability’s leadership mantle, women are establishing best
practices and bypassing the industry’s regressive gender biases. Under female leadership,
industry sustainability organizations are unraveling the decades of environmental and human
resource abuse generated by the fashion industry’s product development activities (Roshitsh,
2019).
Context and Background of the Problem
Invisible barriers, such as the glass ceiling, have been used to illustrate the limitations
hampering women’s leadership success in many global industries, including those industries
known as feminized industries. Williams (1992) expanded on the glass ceiling metaphor by
describing a glass escalator that promoted male employees into leadership roles faster than their
female colleagues. Williams further identified that organizations were championing the
promotion of men over women in alignment with organizational and societal expectations. Glass
ceilings, glass escalators, and glass runways metaphorically describe the industry boundaries
known for derailing women’s careers and goals while at the same time short tracking their male
colleagues’ career success (Miller, 2016; Stokes, 2015; Williams, 1992). The fashion industry’s
2
gender barrier, identified as a glass runway by Stokes (2015), favors the gay male designer over
his equally educated and skilled female peers (Wilson, 2005). The United States’ fashion
classrooms have an 85% female student majority, who matriculate into the industry’s entry-level
creative positions (Friedman, 2015; Stokes, 2015). Most of fashion’s preamble design positions
are filled by eager young female fashion designers who seek promotion and come face-to-face
with the career reality of gender imbalance (Brown et al., 2018). Yet, female designers hold only
2.7% of the industry’s top design roles (Stokes, 2015; Wilson, 2005). Although women lead with
an androgynous mix of communal, agentic, and transformational traits (Eagly & Carli, 2007;
Eagly & Johannessen-Schmidt, 2001), pervasive gender bias barriers in male-centric
organizations can keep women from breaking through (Roberts, 2019). The feminized fashion
industry remains a male-dominated boys’ club (Brown et al., 2018; Stokes, 2017).
Unseen barriers blocked women from obtaining the creative roles that generate the
products created for women’s everyday use (Dodd, 2012; Henry, 2009; Miller, 2016; Stokes,
2015, 2017). Though women make up well over 80% of the fashion industry employees, they fail
to claim top creative roles and leadership positions at a proportional level, leaving the decision-
making power in their male peers’ hands (Campos Franco et al., 2019, Clark, 2012; Friedman,
2018). Repressed by systemic gender bias, women have taken a transformative and communal
approach to address industrial resource impacts left by male leadership and shift the industry’s
actions to sustainability practices (Heitzmann & Liu, 2018). Though women have struggled to
navigate fashion’s leadership labyrinth as founding entrepreneurs, women are succeeding by
establishing new organizations that pave the way for sustainable and systemic industry change
(Heitzmann & Liu, 2018; Mattis, 2004; Roshitsh, 2019).
3
Purpose of the Project and Research Questions
The purpose of this study is to unpack the complicated career journeys of the fashion
sustainability movement’s female leaders by sharing the lived experience stories of sustainable
fashion’s female leaders. In addition, this study will illustrate how these determined women used
their values and beliefs to ameliorate the entrenched procedures and obstacles to champion
systemic change to mitigate the power barriers and the industry’s destructive behaviors. The
following research questions guide this study:
1. To what degree are women emerging as the leaders of the sustainable fashion movement?
2. What factors have inspired sustainable fashion’s female leaders to transcend society’s
role barriers to become leaders of change?
3. To what extent will sustainable fashion’s female leaders become the role models for
industry practice innovation?
Importance of the Study
There is little existing research focusing on the leadership role inequities found in today’s
male-dominated field of fashion and its impact on industry behavior and practice outcomes. In
addition, research investigating the environmental and human impacts from apparel
manufacturing sustainable supply chain activities is emerging (Amed & Berg; 2019; Ellen
MacArthur Foundation, 2017; Leibowitz, 2019; Quantis, 2018). However, any investigation into
the connection between sustainable supply chain practices and gendered leadership is
nonexistent.
Gender inequities continue to limit female opportunities from the factory floor to design
studios and creative director appointments, although 80% of the global industry’s 60 million
workers are female (Amed & Berg, 2017; Campos Franco et al., 2019; Mattis, 2004). With most
4
industry employees being female, the pervasive human rights abuses are of global concern
forcing industry organizations to acknowledge the ongoing gender bias (Maglieri, 2018). The
Glass Runway study conducted with the Council of Fashion Designers of America, Glamour
Magazine, and McKinsey and Company surveyed 535 industry professionals regarding gender
behavior. Of those surveyed, 100% of the women surveyed agreed there is persistent gender bias
across the industry, yet only half of the men surveyed shared the same belief (Brown et al.,
2018). The gendered perception of the bias illustrates the inequity facing female designers
creating products for female consumers using the traditional industry systems. Role models and
career mentorship would support women in establishing their careers and fulfilling their dreams
(Brown et al., 2018; Mattis, 2004).
Within the textile and fashion industry, sustainability practices address an array of
industrial manufacturing practice transgressions impacting the planet and humankind.
Environmental and atmospheric impacts are related to usage or disposal volumes, including the
consumption of natural resources, greenhouse gas emissions, carbon creation, clean air and water
issues, industrial waste, pre-and post-consumer waste, and animal rights (Ellen MacArthur
Foundation, 2017; Environmental Protection Agency [EPA], 2020; Quantis, 2018). The fashion
and textile supply chain generates $3.2 trillion U.S. dollars in annual revenue while generating
45 million tons of textile waste (Amen & Berg, 2019, 2020, Ellen MacArthur Foundation, 2017).
Sustainability with the intersection of the human impact involves the rights, abuses, and
employment of individuals involved in the industry’s activities, including the adjacent global
manufacturing communities and cultures (Ellen MacArthur Foundation, 2017; Maglieri, 2018).
The shared lived experiences of the female leaders who have mitigated the existing societal and
cultural barriers to reach leadership success will offer direction for future female fashion leaders
5
(Eagly & Carli, 2007; Mattis, 2004). As women pursue cleaner and kinder industry strategies to
ameliorate global manufacturing resource impacts, they will become the needed role models of
tomorrow’s creative female majority (Amen & Berg, 2020; Heitzmann & Liu, 2018).
Overview of Theoretical Framework and Methodology
The suppressed hiring, promotion, and acceptance of female leadership in the fashion
industry have hampered career equity gains across fashion’s feminized ranks (Maglieri, 2018).
Fashion’s societal role expectations fit people uniformly into their expected industry boxes, with
women filling associate, assistant, and mid-level design positions and 90% of the male designers
ascending to the industry’s top creative power roles of brand creative director (Brown et al.,
2018; Stokes, 2017; Wilson, 2005). Social role theory (SRT) will serve as the theoretical
framework for exploring industry-wide gender biases that prevent women from holding positions
of power (Eagly & Carli, 2007; Eagly & Karau, 2002). This phenomenological qualitative field
study will use this framework to identify why highly skilled, educated, determined, and creative
women are training their powers to correct the industry’s resource degradation left by decades of
maintaining the status quo with business practice malfeasance. Women’s leadership capabilities
powered by empathy and compassion are well tailored for leading industry change in the
sustainability movement. SRT is an appropriate framework for this study because it focuses on
society’s stereotypical prejudice towards women in leadership concerning their self-belief,
business assumptions, and gendered role expectations. The critical-transformative lens further
highlights how women leaders’ experiences in traditional industry careers led them to seek their
future roles within the fashion industry’s sustainability movement.
6
Definition of Terms
The fashion industry uses specific terms for identifying the resources and outputs
generated in the industry’s activities, in marketing materials, annual reports, and advertising to
express corporate commitments and or global manufacturing and use initiatives. A targeted list
of defined terms is provided to support understanding the specialized terminology used by
fashion and textile practitioners. Many of the industry terms used to describe the finished
products or product development actions as they intersect with environmental and human
resource use and abuse are considered interchangeable. For example, the terms sustainability,
eco-friendly, green, and responsible have all been in the press, media, and organizational
reporting. Sustainability activities can occur during the conceptualization stages of development,
in the numerous supply chain manufacturing steps, including the global transportation and
distribution of fashion garments and accessories.
There is widespread disagreement between field practitioners on the correct terminology
and usage related to sustainable practices (Thomas, 2019). Over the past decade, sustainability
has become a keyword for the global industry and will continue to grow with increased customer
awareness due to social media reporting of industry behaviors (Amed & Berg, 2016, 2019, 2021;
Thomas, 2019). Consumer concern has grown with the awareness of the global brands’
manufacturing abuses during the COVID-19 pandemic (Amed & Berg, 2021). Sustainable
practices in fashion design are a growing movement within the fashion industry, extending
beyond clothing components and finished wearable products. Sustainable fashion seeks to bring
systemic change to the development and manufacturing of fashion products with ecological
integrity and engaged social justice (Campos Franco et al., 2019; Roshitsh, 2019). For this
study’s purpose, the terms sustainability and sustainable fashion will enfold the social, cultural,
7
environmental, and financial value systems incorporated in the processes and methodologies
used for fiber, textile, and apparel production.
For the purpose of this dissertation, the term women will be used as a noun to reference
cisgender women and identifying women, as the noun men refers to cisgender men or identifying
men. Female or male will be used as an adjective to include cisgender and identifying gender.
The products of menswear or womenswear are created for wear by humans, presenting according
to their gender presentation choice at a given time. However, product development fits
designated business market segments and sells according to specific market calendars and retail
timing. A list of crucial industry definitions is provided to better understand the particular terms
used in this dissertation.
1.5 degrees is the scientific estimate indicating by limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees
Celsius would reduce the odds of initiating the most dangerous and irreversible effects of climate
change. (Amen & Berg, 2021).
Agentic refers to the behavioral traits demonstrated by social dominance through self-
assertion and competitiveness (Eagly, 1987; Eagly & Carli, 2007).
Apparel is any type of clothing worn by men, women, or children. Synonyms: attire,
clothing, garments (Calasibetta & Tortora, 2003 a).
Clothing is the term encompassing all items intended to cover a person’s body, as well as
terms that have either a broad or specific definition, such as the term “garment” or the term
“motorcycle jacket.” Clothing and apparel are interchangeable (Cregan, 2007).
Communal is the term used for the demonstrated behavioral traits of selflessness and
concern for others, embodied in the desire to be part of a group, team, or community (Eagly,
1987).
8
Creative director is the top creative role for leadership in an organization. A creative
director sets the overall aesthetics represented in product output. The creative director is the
highest creative position in a fashion brand or house, typically carrying a C-suite executive’s
power. A creative director is an aesthetic arbiter for a brand’s identity: voice, brand look, and
strategy; providing leadership to the design, product, and market content teams, expertise in user
experience, and application of market research. This role reports to the CEO (Glassdoor, 2020).
In the modern luxury fashion industry, the brand’s creative director’s persona plays an essential
role in upholding its value and image. With their artistic talents, vision, and ability to personify
the brand, creative directors have the power to reinterpret the brand’s iconic symbols and
products into new versions appropriate for the current marketplace (Vander Ploeg & Lee, 2018).
Fabric is the blank cloth canvas on which or from which fashion is built. Fabric can be
woven or non-woven, knitted, or felted fibers, ranging from cotton to silk, organdy to georgette,
jersey, tweed, velvet, and more, coming in every spectrum of color, weight, and print imaginable
(Amen & Berg, 2020).
Fashion describes clothing of the current style, trend, and time. Fashion typically has a
higher aesthetic value than functional apparel by industry and consumers. Sociologists, fashion
historians, and art scholars identify fashion as the wearable and styled garments accepted by
many people for a definitive period of time (Women’s Wear Daily [WWD], 2015).
Fashion Designer is a person engaged in creating original clothing and accessories in
various areas of the fashion design industry (Calasibetta & Tortora, 2007). The designer
conceptualizes and designs garments crafted from fibers, yarns, hides, and textiles to adorn,
protect, and function for the human body. A fashion designer is responsible for ideating new
designs, materials, color choices, testing, fitting, and size grading for function on a body,
9
displaying at events, and creating detailed manufacturing plans. Fashion designers create
clothing for numerous market sectors, including womenswear, menswear, childrenswear, and
androgenous products. The top job titles in fashion design are creative director, design director,
and head designer (Glassdoor, 2021). A sustainable fashion designer’s role includes traditional
problem-solving skills combined with the challenges of environmental stewardship and
sustainability practices (Langren & Pasricha, 2011).
Feminized Industry describes an industry having the majority of its employees and
consumers being female (Stokes, 2017).
Gendered Roles refers to the shared beliefs are ascribed to individuals based on their
socially identified sex (Eagly, 1987).
Impact indicates adverse or beneficial effect or output of an activity, product, or
substance on the environment or human health (EPA, Glossary of Sustainable Manufacturing
Terms 2020).
Mentor and Mentorship are terms describing the engagement of a trusted industry
professional who offers counsel and serves as a role model, providing advice, guidance, and
support to peers and junior-level professionals beginning their careers (Sherman, 2021).
Modern Slavery is an umbrella term referring to situations of exploitation that a person
cannot refuse or leave because of threats, violence, coercion, deception, or abuse of power and
reflective of Sustainable Development (SDG) Goal 8.7 (WalkFreeOrg., 2018).
Organic is the title or label used to identify products grown or cultivated without
pesticides, hormones, synthetic fertilizers, and other toxic materials. “Organic” is a food labeling
term used with the authority of the Organic Foods Production Act (EPA, Glossary of Sustainable
Manufacturing Terms, 2020).
10
Social roles are the social norms attributed to people related to their social and work
positions (Eagly, 1987).
Social role theory is organized around the male and female gender binary pertaining to
society’s behavioral expectations (Eagly, 1987; Eagly & Wood, 1999).
Sustainability is three-dimensional, consisting of environmental, social, and economic
dimensions. Each of these dimensions should be in balance with the others. If the sustainable
symbiotic relationships are out of step, all the benefits will be temporary or short-lived.
Interconnectivity supports equal attention for each practice step to ensure long-term
sustainability and resiliency (Tan, 2020). Sustainability: Within a business context, decisions
include considering environmental, social, and human impacts for the long term, involving all
the steps of a company’s products and services and how they contribute to sustainable
development (Amen & Berg, 2021).
Sustainable Design describes the processes and items created and produced with
environmentally benign, economically viable, and socially equitable practices (North Carolina
State University [NCSU], 2021a).
Sustainable Development refers to the actions that generate new output while meeting the
needs of the present without compromising future generations’ ability to meet their own needs
(NCSU, 2021b).
Sustainable Fashion describes clothing as designed, manufactured, distributed, and used
responsibly for the planet, the environmental resources, and people. Sustainable fashion is a
movement within the global industry (Thomas, 2019).
Supply Chain is the term used to describe the organization’s requisite activities for
making and delivering goods or services to the consumer. A supply chain focuses on the core
11
activities within an organization required to convert raw materials or parts to finished products or
services. Supply chain activities include product development, sourcing, production, logistics,
and information coordination systems (Handfield, 2020).
Textiles are artifacts or cloth made of natural or synthetic textile yarns by weaving,
knitting, lace making, braiding, netting, or felting. (Calasibetta & Tortora, 2007 c).
Value Chain is the complete multi-step process for developing and bringing to market
fashion products, including fiber and materials development and procurement, sales, distribution,
consumption, and end of product use, including reuse and recycling. (Gereffi et al., 2005).
Organization of the Study
This first chapter provided a broad overview of the problem of practice that propels the
focus for this study. Chapter Two includes a comprehensive review of pertinent literature related
to the traditional and sustainable fashion industry’s gender evolved differences, psychological
factors, and social roles within the industry as framed by social role theory. Chapter Three details
the implicit need for this study and shares the methodology for identifying and choosing the
qualitative phenomenological field study participants and the collection and analysis of the data.
Chapter Four presents the study’s findings gathered from the lived experiences of the
interviewed participants. Finally, recommendations for future research on female leadership in
the sustainable fashion industry are shared in Chapter Five.
12
Chapter Two: Review of the Literature
The purpose of this literature review is to provide an understanding of leadership in the
traditional and sustainable fashion industry practices by revealing the global industry's human
and natural resource impacts aligned to the evolved gender role differences, established
psychological barriers for advancement, and social role expectations in the feminized industry.
Fashion’s gendered leadership is a topic identified and reported on in trade papers and
organizational reports. Yet, little demonstrative empirical research has surfaced linking male-
dominated leadership with status quo practice impacts. Likewise, there is little research
conducted into how sustainability’s female leaders battled industry bias to alter traditional
industry practices and implement sustainability procedures. The conventional global fashion
industry generates a myriad of impacts affecting livelihoods, career choices, and the wellbeing of
the planet's beings while consuming planetary resources in untenable volumes used in product
manufacturing processes. Manufacturing impacts are spun together with the daily industry
practices acknowledged for gender and race bias, human rights abuse globally, and natural
resource degradation (Shinbrot et al., 2019; Stevenson & Cole, 2018). The industry leaders make
the decisions that lead to the practice outcomes. Social role theory is the framework used to
explore leadership in the feminized industry and discover the roles women are championing in
the sustainable fashion movement.
Fashion’s Traditional Vortex
Employment numbers, product volumes, and annual industry gains are gauges to weigh
the global fashion industry's power. Brand, label, and design success are acknowledged in the
press with accolades for creativity and expanded yearly growth. While the $3.2 trillion global
annual revenue (Amed & Berg, 2021) preens as profit-focused growth, the industry's practice
13
behaviors come at a prohibitive cost. The materials and process choices made in the design
studio and across the product development supply chain for conventional fashion manufacturing
cause environmental impacts and human rights concerns (Amed & Berg, 2019). Gender inequity,
human rights abuses, and ecological degradation spotlight the feminized fashion industry habits,
where over 93% of the leadership is male, and 80% of the workforce is female (Brown et al.,
2019; Campos Franco et al., 2019; Stokes, 2015). These employment numbers expose an
industry’s bias that does not fit the community it purports to support.
The feminized traditional fashion industry’s dominant male leadership stands in contrast
to the employee majority it leads and the female customer it serves. Women are
underrepresented as fashion industry leaders, and without communally grounded leadership
making people-centric choices, the industry continues to repeat the missteps in human rights and
manufacturing resource management behaviors and practices (Benstead et al., 2020; Caniato et
al., 2012; Deeley, 2020). The exclusionary practices existent in the product-based industry
affects women’s pay, career advancement, and their safety in the workplace (Ellen MacArthur
Foundation, 2017; Lindemann et al., 2016; Stokes, 2017). Women struggle to gain acceptance as
industry leaders due to society's traditional gendered role expectations for followership and
leadership (Eagly & Karau, 2002; Eagly & Steffen, 1984). The subservient follower roles
assigned to women are internalized, creating an additional self-inflicted career handicapping
regarding managerial and leadership positions (Schock et al., 2018; Wood & Eagly, 2015). The
fashion industry's traditional hiring, promotion, and manufacturing practices prize profits over
planet preservation or the equitable treatment of people (Clark, 2012; Deeley, 2020; Stokes,
2015, Thomas, 2019). Gender equity across the fashion industry has decreased in the last two
decades, and environmental impacts have increased incrementally (Caniato et al., 2012). Since
14
the 1980’s the industry's growth-focused business structure has increased its dependence on
stock market investment and oversight, with brand and retail consolidations cementing the
transactional behaviors in the global apparel, fashion, and accessory development and
manufacturing (Oelze, 2017). Fashion’s gender roles barriers and environmental degradation
have collided, raising concerns for the industry's future. The cumulative effect of the industry’s
male dominance is a practice phenomenon conjuring the perfect fashion storm.
Glass Houses and Gendered Barriers
The workplace presents an unequal playing field where men gain promotion and
compensation above their female counterparts regardless of occupation, industry, or country.
Workforce imbalances were first identified as glass barriers impeding women's career
advancement and raising the challenge for all women to shatter them once and for all (Williams,
1992). Women in the Global North’s industrialized nations experienced an evolution into
industry glass ceilings as they moved from being homemakers to employees; the understanding
of why the barriers and the limitations existed was uncharted territory. Gender stereotypes
connect the expected characteristics assigned to gender and apply them to anticipated behaviors
according to the gender categories (Eagly & Karau, 2002). These stereotypes affect the
opportunities of workplace role expectations for both men and women (Bisom-Rapp & Sargeant,
2016; Eagly & Karau, 2002). Eagly and Steffen (1984) assessed stereotypes of women in the
workplace by comparing agentic and communal traits when women were the minority at the
workplace and when gender comparison was between the employee and the homemaker. The
1984 seminal study uncovered the difference in gender roles in the workplace that aligned to
stereotypical expectations of status and authority (Eagly & Steffen, 1984). For example,
competitive, visionary, and decisive authority are agentic personality attributes ascribed to men,
15
whereas women's subservient, caring, and diplomatic followership align to communal behavioral
characteristics (Eagly & Karau, 2002).
Today the global workforce is nearly 60% female, yet career advancement for women is
still stagnant in many industries due to practice specific barricades (Catalyst, 2018). Existing
practice limitations described by glass metaphors and winding mazes explain the gender barriers
that hold women back from making their way along a career path that leads to the top rungs of
their chosen organizational ladder. However, research conducted in the past four decades has
established that women in male-dominated fields of study, careers, and roles have the ability and
capacity to succeed (Bisom-Rapp & Sargeant, 2016; Eagly & Johannessen Schmidt, 2001).
Williams (1992) described the glass escalator to illustrate how men advanced more
consistently and quickly than their female peers due to the gendered expectations of career roles.
Gender bias is well documented in traditional business professions such as politics, medicine,
and law (Kennedy & Kray, 2015; Proudfoot et al., 2015; Schneider & Bos, 2019). Promotional
bias persists where the merit of the talent is overwhelmed by the preservation of the norm
(Auster & Prasad, 2016). The practice parameters and organizational expectations create gender
barriers that deter women from achieving their career goals (Stokes, 2015; Williams, 1992).
Brown (2007) describes power as the ability to create change if that change is truly
desired. The glass barrier metaphors illustrate the career barricades however they do not offer
insight into the impacts on women’s self-efficacy (Auster & Prasad, 2016). Creating change
unencumbered by the status quo is a pipe dream when existing role expectations detour career
aspirations. A metaphoric labyrinth describes the determination women need to continue to forge
ahead through a career maze masquerading as a harmless garden path (Eagly & Carli, 2007).
With male designers controlling the most influential fashion houses' creative direction and design
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studios, talented women designers stagnate on the lower rungs of fashions’ design ladder
(Stokes, 2017).
Across the arts and design industries, the press, art brokers, and art consumers undervalue
women’s creative efforts (Miller, 2016). Along with their skills education, female designers are
trained to accept workplace inequities to stay employed in the field (Friedman, 2018; Stokes,
2017). As a result, fashion’s design gender imbalances present in pay, job promotions, press, and
industry accolades and awards (Stokes, 2015, 2017; Williams, 1992; Wilson, 2005). Once the
press identifies a fashion designer as an exemplary talent, their career trajectory is set. Press
acclaim leads to market adoption of luxury retailers solidifying a designer's career, which in turn
delivers retail engagement, followed by consumer acceptance, resulting in future business
success (Friedman, 2018; Stokes, 2015).
In 2005, a New York Times article exposed the fashion industry’s gender bias by sharing
the existing gender inequities that negatively impacted women designers’ career success while
prioritizing the careers of gay men designers in the field (Wilson, 2005). Wilson queried if the
preferential treatment given to male fashion designers was because of their self-proclaimed
superior design abilities that allowed them to create fantasy clothing for women without realistic
expectations (2005). Research into the industry's preferential treatment of male designers in the
feminized field led to the coining of fashion's "Glass Runway," the metaphor used to describe the
pervasive inequity in fashion's treatment of men and women designers (Stokes, 2015). The glass
runway metaphor illustrates the hiring practices found in the feminized fashion industry, which
promote the career advancement of male fashion designers, notably gay men overall women
regardless of sexual orientation or identity (Stokes, 2015). Though fashion's gender bias was a
well-known secret, whispered about for decades, any industry acknowledgment of gender biases
17
on female designer’s success was quickly dismissed or denied (Clark, 2012; Friedman, 2018).
Before Stokes’ 2015 study uncovered the double standards of creative genius, the fashion
industry’s inequitable gender behaviors were not the subject of empirical research. After the
Stokes 2015 research emerged, the topic of gender inequity had become fair game for the
industry trade papers and trade organizations reports, resulting in an industry-funded
investigation that confirmed Stokes' data (Brown et al., 2018; Maglieri, 2018). The CFDA-
McKinsey-Glamour study revealed that of the 535 people surveyed, 100% of the women felt
gender inequity was a real issue in the industry, where only 50% of the men polled identified the
imbalance as an issue (Brown et al., 2018). The perception discrepancy illustrates the industry's
awareness of its gender career imbalances and its expectation for preserving the business status
quo (Auster & Prasad, 2016).
The highlighted industry inequities have changed hiring practices, promotional efforts,
and expanded training for women leaders and entrepreneurs (Maglieri, 2018). Workplace change
is happening, and the U.S. Bureau of Labor and Statistics (BLS) 2019 report indicates that
women were participating in the labor force with the continued stable engagement of 57% across
age and race (BLS, 2019). The BLS report shows female designers parallel the levels for
employment at 53%, though the designer category did not specify the rank level of position, nor
the market sector. The 2020 Catalyst report found women remain behind men in pay, receiving
just $0.79 to men's $1 wage in the United States, while over a career span, women receive $400k
less than their male colleagues (Catalyst, 2020, 2021). The Institute for Women's Policy
Research (IWPR) gender wage study exposed an incremental pay decrease tied to race and
ethnicity (Hegewisch & Barsi, 2020). The pay gap parallels the promotion gap for women, with
only 27% of global chief executives being female (Catalyst, 2020). Neither BLS nor IWPR
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studies specified self-employment or entrepreneurship, where fashion designers make their mark
by creating namesake labels and brands (BLS, 2019; IWPR, 2019).
The barriers to advancement for women led to a mass exodus from corporate America
into entrepreneurship (Kephart & Schumacher, 2005). A lack of mentoring and business training
challenges female entrepreneurship, where gender bias lurks in the lower levels of financial
investment and board engagement (Winn, 2005). Male business support systems are seen to
depress opportunities for economic growth in female-owned and run businesses (Miller, 2016;
Winn, 2005). Women in fashion face an opaque veil of gender bias in the industry’s supply chain
workplaces (Friedman, 2018; Mallon, 2021). For women to rise out of fashion’s constrictive
career control, there need to be more women in the pipeline willing to speak against the implicit
biases girdling them tightly in their place (Auster & Prasad, 2016; Brown et al., 2018). With
more women filling fashion’s leadership pipeline, role models and mentorship opportunities will
support women’s future leadership goals (Shinbrot et al., 2019). As women expand their
leadership reach in business and entrepreneurship, the socio-cultural norm restrictions will
unravel, allowing women to realize their entrepreneurial potential by establishing themselves as
role models for the women watching them from the ranks (Kephart & Schumacher, 2005; Syna
& Costea, 2015). Sustainable fashion’s female designers design with global resource
accountability woven into product outputs while establishing themselves as revolutionary
industry role models.
Global Impacts and Accountable Actions
The profit focused practices of fashion product development have left their mark on the
environment and the human populations producing the world’s wearable products. To create the
fibers needed to build fashion products, natural resources, such as water and soil, are a required
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part of the production supply chain. The thirsty cotton crop is grown and regrown as mono-crops
in fields producing one harvest per year (Textile Exchange, 2019). Cotton consumes the water
for plant growth, then it is used in the finishing of the fiber for textiles, the construction and
coloring of the fabrics themselves, and the construction finishing of each pair of pants (Amen &
Berg, 2019, 2021; Ellen MacArthur Foundation, 2017). The touchpoints are many, and the clean
water scarcity impacts are genuine for manufacturing communities. Retail pricing has not kept
pace with the rising cost of living. The cost imbalances have precipitated the global sourcing
activities that chase pricing alignment to a manufactured bottom line, not a resource price reality
(Portway, 2016). The question of how pricing suppression was possible is just now being asked
in today's fashion press, while the question of why it was possible remains unanswered by the
brands making the jeans (Amen & Berg, 2021). The profit-focused bottom line thinking still
dominates today’s industry behavior while overshadowing supply chain practice concerns
(Kennedy & Kray, 2015).
Manufacturing Sustainability
The idea of ethical manufacturing stands at odds with the business ideal of scaled brand
growth (Ellen MacArthur Foundation, 2018.) The discussion of volume manufacturing rarely
includes the fashion designers whose creative vision materializes with their materials and craft
choices. As designers fulfill the needs of their products, their manufacturing impacts are
inseparable from the decisions of ethical sourcing, environmental burdens, and social
responsibility. (Claxton & Kent, 2020; Thomas, 2019). Designers craft their seasonal prototypes,
handing them off to product development team members charged with sourcing and procuring
the materials for manufacturing outputs (Brown et al., 2018). The supply chain team are the
“decision makers” tasked with balancing the costs of manufacturing a garment to the expected
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retail price, engage the “decision doers” who are generating the actual products for the proposed
prices (Ulasewicz, 2015, p. 100).
Sustainability in fashion practices has multiple potential pathways. McDonough and
Braungart (2002) presented their conception of circular product development in their seminal
book. They followed with a second volume focused on upcycling by expanding the concept
resource (Braungart & McDonough, 2013). Their work was foundational for institutions looking
at product life cycles (Cradle to Cradle Innovation Institute) and spun into numerous
organizations and efforts (Diekel et al., 2021). Notably, the Ellen MacArthur Foundation focuses
its philanthropic efforts on supporting the transition to a circular economy across various
industries, with fashion manufacturing being at the top of the foundation’s priority (Ellen
MacArthur Foundation, 2017). In addition, the Cradle-to-Cradle Innovation Institute has
established a foundation for better understanding and potential implementation of circularity
processing into the global supply chain (Diekel et al., 2021).
Circularity in the fashion value chain is complicated. The concept revolves around the
cradle to cradle ideal of the reuse of resources, taking a used product, moving into materials,
recycling keeping it out of the landfills to reuse the resources and feedstock of one item in the
creation of a new one (McDonough & Braungart, 2002). The resources become recycled and
renewed into new items of the same value or more, therefore upcycled for new ownership and
use (McDonough & Braungart, 2013). The fiber supply intersects with the textiles manufacturing
supply line that merges with the apparel manufacturing supply chains, funneling into the sales
and distribution of products, from wholesale, retail, business to customers for use and eventually
for discard and potential destruction or reuse. The intersections are decision points for product
development, yet the choices are often not considered in the design ideation or manufacturing
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stages (Campos Franco et al., 2019; Curwen et al., 2012). Circularity success is challenged at
every step in the value chain for fashion (Diekel et al., 2021). Natural fibers are grown from the
soil or an animal: cotton, hemp, linen is planet-based fibers, where silk, wool, cashmere, alpaca,
angora, and mohair yield from animals (Gullingsrud, 2017). Manmade fibers are chemically
generated from resources such as petroleum for polyester, nylon, and acrylic or wood pulp
decomposition needed to create viscose, rayon, bamboo, Tencel, and modal (Gullingsrud, 2017).
The harvest of the fibers, the scouring, carding, combing, and spinning are the steps that must
occur before the fiber is in a state that can be used for knitting or weaving into textiles for cutting
and sewing into wearable items. Each step of the fiber to textiles processes has human and
environmental involvement, carrying potential dangers, from the use of industrial machinery and
equipment to runoff of effluents and gases (Gullingsrud & Perkins, 2015). Once textiles are
created, garments are cut from the cloth and sewn together to make garments. Manufacturing
cutting and sewing processes require human capital and have changed little throughout time
(Ulasewicz, 2015). Artificial intelligence (AI) is beginning to make its way into large scale
manufacturing garment facilities however the majority of clothing made today still requires
intentional human involvement (Dunne, 2015; Ulasewicz, 2015). Nascent embedded
technologies remain experimental novelties for use in the textiles and apparel manufacturing
realm (Dunne, 2015).
The peoples creating the world’s clothing come from all over the globe (Hethorn &
Ulasewicz, 2015). As long as humans have been using cloth to protect themselves from the
elements, humans have been generating wearable items. The impacts of the products on the
people who make them and the land the fibers are grown from are significant (World Wildlife
Fund, 2013). The sustainable fashion movement is supplying transparency for how products
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were built, where they were generated, what happens to the garments after they are used to help
shift the industry to responsible manufacturing systems.
Resource Reporting
In 2017, Ellen MacArthur Foundation produced their first significant report highlighting
the immediate need for circularity measures in the fashion and textile industry to still fashion’s
self-generated consumption vortex (Ellen MacArthur Foundation, 2017). The report brought to
light the severity of manufacturing impacts for humans and the planet. The Business of Fashion
(BOF), the respected digital source for global fashion industry news, put forward their first
annual state of the industry report in 2016, each year focusing on the pressing issues for the
coming year (Amen & Berg, 2016). Each year the BOF report speaks to the industry’s struggles
with the impacts of its actions, ranging from human rights abuses, gender inequity, racial
inequality, and environmental resource degradation (Amen & Berg, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019,
2020, 2021).
Quantis Corporation, in collaboration with the Textiles Exchange, the global sustainable
fiber and textiles organization, generated a focused 2018 industry report drilling into
manufacturing impacts regarding resource use and waste statistics (Quantis, 2018). The report
identified the construction of the materials and use for apparel and accessories. Global circularity
implementation is not yet available for full-scale garment composability. According to the
Fashion Positive Textile Exchange webinar, the infrastructure is simply not available (Textile
Exchange, 2019). The data gathered from the world’s most recognized brands offered chilling
news on the waste and pollution spun from manufacturing plants (Quantis, 2018).
Waste management reporting has supplied the textile and apparel discard data that has
astounded the world. Over 45 million tons of textile waste is generated annually, where an
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additional 60 million tons of textiles are created (EPA, 2019). Each year, 40% of the clothing
made does not sell at regular price, resulting in the discarding of the clothing by the very
manufacturers that developed it for the market. U.S. consumers spend millions of dollars on new
clothing annually. Over 11 million tons of apparel waste is sent each year to U.S. landfills,
equating to more than 68 pounds of apparel discard per person. The gap between textile
recycling and discarding is still too vast to be bridged (EPA, 2019).
The BOF has generated annual reports highlighting the industry impacts that affect the
trillion-dollar industry (Amen & Berg, 2019, 2020, 2021). Sustainability Index (2021) endeavors
to incorporate social impact and environmental performance into an approachable and actionable
analysis for the global industry. The fashion industry creates over 4% of the total global Green
House Gas (GHG) emissions, with as much as 70% of the industry’s emissions generated during
the processing of materials and the production of garments (Berg & Magnus, 2020). The reports
indicate that the $3.2 trillion-dollar industry has arduous work ahead to correct its emissions
trajectory and realign with the 2030 Paris Accord’s 1.5-degree pathway. The numbers present a
sobering reality for the planet and the industry’s bottom line.
Sustainable Goals
In 2015, the United Nations released their global Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)
plan. The United Nations developed the seventeen goals to encourage the nations of the world to
find commonality in the quest to save the planet. Global sustainability systems designated by the
United Nations plan help to develop strategies for worldwide resource savings. The SDGs have
vast implications for change involvement, and brand engagement will differ according to their
missions and organizational goals (Amen & Berg, 2021).
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Reconsidering the design of materials and garment components to accelerate circular
processes in fashion is building collaborative alliances between fibers, yarns, and processing
mills. Transparency in the processing stages establishes a new order for fashion product
development when the ideation aligns with organizational values. Investment in innovative
technologies is needed to support the manufacturing volumes produced across the globe annually
(Amen & Berg, 2021). While the SDGs offer enlightenment of the industrial realities faced by
people worldwide, the brands have disassociated themselves from the facts of their daily practice
impacts felt across the global value chain.
By engaging with the SDGs, the world’s major brands can see where their products
invade populations and ecospheres. The brands use the SDGs to guide present their practices
while attempting to avoid greenwashing actual results (Gaskill-Fox et al., 2014). Global research
investment addresses more than manufacturing technologies, with the investigation into support
of community populations offering an understanding of local needs. Understanding the needs for
the world’s species' health and wellbeing can expand realistic action values for brand
engagement (Amen & Berg, 2020).
Intentional Profits and Purposeful Practice
Products crafted in the global trillion-dollar supply chain use fibers grown in one country,
woven into textiles in another, shipped across oceans to be cut and sewn into clothing by people
far removed from fashion’s retail consumers (Ulasewicz, 2015). Each choice in the complex
supply chain requires sourcing and processing decisions incurring costs that are marked up to
meet market demand (Claxton & Kent, 2020; Portway, 2019). Fashion's profit and loss business
strategies perpetuate practices that erase the planet and its people from bottom-line equations
(Brandenburg et al., 2020). Sixty percent of the clothing volume generated each year is sold at
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full price, making the reality of fashion economics simply bad math (Amen & Berg, 2021). At
any price point, producing clothing requires copious natural resources throughout the entire
process, from fiber processing, cloth dyeing to finished garment construction (Ulasewicz, 2015).
While conceptualizing fashion products is the responsibility of brand designers, generating the
manufactured products for retail sales is the business of the supply chain managers (Amen &
Berg, 2020; Ulasewicz, 2015). The fashion industry employs over 60 million workers throughout
the complex value chain, from apparel and textile designers to global sourcing agents,
patternmakers, construction technicians, sewing machine operators, and quality control
inspectors (Amen & Berg, 2020). From the design room to the factory sewing floor, the brand or
label directive is creating reproducible and wearable garments at a market acceptable price for a
predetermined consumer base, all within a specific timeframe (Hethorn & Ulasewicz, 2015).
The fashion industry has been manufacturing at a frenetic pace since the late 1980s, with
each years' product manufacturing output expanding exponentially and consuming planetary
resources with the growth (Stolz & Kane, 2015). As manufacturing volume has increased, so has
the volume of post-industrial textile waste flowing into global landfills (Diekel et al., 2021; EPA,
2019). For the traditional manufacturing supply chain to generate the clothing volume demanded
by the wholesale and retail markets, the processing of fibers, textiles, and finished garments
consumes copious natural resources, including clean water, air, and healthy soils (Kozlowski et
al., 2018; Paraschiv et al., 2015). To separate the sustainability movement's goals and practices
from traditional fashion industry activities, sustainability leaders endeavor to present the
environmental and human resource stories by indicating the implications of continued status quo
product development used to generate market-ready products (Gaskill-Fox et al., 2014; Thomas,
2019). However, the fashion industry has yet to assimilate a clear action plan for implementing
26
worldwide sustainable practice change because there is no single identified approach for a
sustainability pathway (Thomas, 2019).
The National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) study of apparel manufacturing
sustainability guidelines found sustainability premiums less than anticipated, indicating cost
reductions will increase as industry adoption broadens (Eccles et al., 2012). The Council of
Fashion Designers of America’s (CFDA) first strategic sustainability guide lays out a protocol
for designers and entrepreneurs to expand industry practice engagement to help drive down costs
across industry sectors (Leibowitz, 2018). Though today’s circularity tools for implementation
remain complicated and cumbersome for scaled brand adoption, as more organizations engage
and adapt their actions, the financial savings of resources, energy, and materials will translate to
significant environmental savings. (Kozlowski et al., 2017).
Product manufacturing is one of the most environmentally impactful aspects of apparel
development (Bottani et al., 2020). The overproduction of products in quantities above retail
demand is one of the most destructive manufacturing issues (Bottani et al., 2020). In a global
impact report, Quantis (2018) identified the dyeing and finishing, yarn preparation, and fiber
production stages as the leading generators of apparel manufacturing pollution. The implications
of volume manufacturing include climate change, increased pollution of air, land, and water
sources, as well as the rise in industrial accidents, including the death caused by the collapse of
workplace factories (Bottani et al., 2020; Siddiqui & Uddin, 2016). The danger remains for the
employees working within the fashion's complex worldwide value chain (Amen & Berg, 2020).
The sustainability movement advocates for business models based on the triple bottom
line (TBL). This bottom-line costing model incorporates planet and people impacts as opposed to
a cost to profit only model. (Elkington, 1998; Hiller Connell & Kozar, 2016). TBL has become a
27
focused tenant for strategic sustainability business development (Hiller Connell & Kozar, 2016).
Culture and governance are being actively discussed as a fourth pillar of sustainable business
planning within the sustainability movement, ensuring that practice and product value be
considered equal to profits and resource consumption (Bottani et al., 2020). Regardless of the
type of profit structure associated with a corporation’s economic formation, the financial bottom
line tallies expectation is to reap an increased return for its shareholders, rendering social good
secondary to the balance sheet (Banerjee, 2008). This conflict of corporate interests compounds
the business issues with sustainability implementation (Banerjee, 2008; Brandenburg et al.,
2020). To date, there remains little research representing the overall economic, environmental,
and human impact effects of a sustainable fashion business model, regardless of intention or
expectation (Brandenburg et al., 2020; Oelze, 2017; Shinbrot et al., 2019; Weingarten et al.,
2017).
The unbalanced gender leadership in fashion organizations impacts women across the
global value chain. As over 80% of the worldwide workforce, the lack of leadership role models
for women undermines the potential for women as individuals, participants in society, as well as
leaders in the business world (Eagly & Carli, 2007; Kephart & Schmacher, 2005). The female
pipeline fills fashion’ design studios and ranks, yet the path to leadership success remains
impassable for most women (Brown et al., 2018; Campo Franco et al., 2019; Stokes, 2017).
Without role models and mentors to help support female industry engagement, women often
retreat from the larger organizations, setting out on their own (Stokes, 2017; Weiler & Bernasek,
2001). The increase in women setting up new sustainable apparel businesses rather than
engaging in traditional corporate fashion practice is both encouraging and concerning (Amen &
Berg, 2020; Weiler & Bernasek, 2001). To eliminate the industry’s existing gendered role
28
barriers, female role models who have confronted the exclusionary behaviors are needed to
provide industry mentorship to support more women navigating fashion’s complex
entrepreneurial business labyrinth.
Gender Beliefs and Behaviors
Self-belief, expertise, training, and persistence are the designer’s fuel for creative
expression and outcomes. Acknowledgment, accolades, and adulation promote a perspective of
accomplishment (Proudfoot et al., 2017; Stokes, 2015). Women’s individual leadership beliefs
develop with their growing self-awareness, skills, and pragmatic expectations (Mattis, 2004;
Roberts & Brown, 2019; Rudman et al., 2011). Through the centuries, creative women were
subjugated by the press, critics, and the public, considered lesser artists, designers, and
innovators (Dodd, 2012; Henry, 2009). The artistic output of women is defined as craft and
handiwork and seen as less creative or innovative than the expressions of their male peers (Dodd,
2012; Proudfoot et al., 2014). Lacking the acclaim and adoration of the press, buyers, and the
anointed purveyors of taste, female fashion designers have seen their careers suppressed by
forces outside their control. Gender barriers are specifically constructed according to practice
parameters and organizational expectations (Stokes, 2015; Williams, 1992).
The explanation of power is the ability to create change if the change is genuinely desired
(Brown, 2007). Creating change unencumbered by the status quo is a pipe dream when existing
role expectations detour career aspirations. Female fashion designers have been relegated to the
follower roles of fashion, serving the creative directors as line designers, pattern designers, and
technicians (Stokes, 2017; Vander Ploeg & Lee, 2018). While receiving the same education,
displaying the same potential for breakout genius, women are known for making wearable,
functional, practical products rather than setting the fashion world on edge (Friedman, 2015;
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Stokes, 2015). Female designers have navigated the fashion industry’s career labyrinth with a
determination and intention unequal to the successful efforts spent by their male peers (Eagly &
Carli, 2007; Stokes, 2015; 2017).
Agency and Expectations
Leaders have been relegated to career paths based on engendered stereotypes with
ascribed leadership traits that have nothing to do with ambition, exerted efforts, or creative
abilities. Stereotypes reflect social realities based on observational data of acknowledged gender
roles that influence individual behaviors that uphold common gender role expectations (Wood &
Eagly, 2015). Leader stereotypes support the societal myths of the great man: all-knowing,
capable beyond peers, bold, and profit-minded, while at the same time replicating the legends of
the empathetic and fragile female, able to dutifully follow commands while caring for her fellow
human beings, young and old (Eagly & Steffen, 1984). The traditional leadership characteristics
of agentic, dominant, and transactional behaviors support the male leader over the female leader
identified by leadership traits focused on adaptability, inclusion, and transformation (Hopkins &
O’Neil, 2015; Northouse, 2019 a).
Today's successful leaders combine communal and transformational character traits to
navigate complex business scenarios and blend clear communication with empathy and insight to
develop trust and engagement (Bolman & Deal, 2013). The topic of sustainability in the context
of environmental and social justice is complex and often triggers emotions of guilt, anger, and
grief (Friedrich, 2017). Emotional sustainability choices can affect leadership decisions as well
as derail institutional practices (Friedrich, 2017; Russell & Griffiths, 2008). Sustainable
fashion's female leaders embody this description by blending authenticity, adaptability, and
communal traits to ensure that ethical perspectives and values support the self-efficacy of team
30
members. As authentic leaders, the women leading the sustainable movement lead with
persistence, motivated by their values and ethics, and supported by their self-discipline and
commitment to the people over profit (Northouse, 2019 b).
As women have shifted from the home to the office, the stereotypes defining the
perceived role capabilities have not tracked the progress at the same rate (Eagly & Karau, 2002).
In the feminized fashion industry, women fill the subordinate roles of seamstress, pattern
designer, and line designer, while men dominate in senior leadership and creative positions, as
CEO, CFO, and creative director (Vander Ploeg & Lee, 2018). Female designers work harder
than their male colleagues to preserve their jobs and receive equitable promotions. Yet, the pay,
press attention, and the elusive prize of leadership remain just out of reach (Eagly & Karau,
2002; Kephart & Schumacher, 2005; Stokes, 2017). Women fashion designers face the
stereotypical societal expectations that value their aesthetic efforts less for creativity than
function (Brown et al., 2018; Dodd, 2012; Stokes, 2015). Fashion’s press has routinely offered
less enthusiastic descriptions for female designer’s creative efforts than that of their male peers,
who come to believe in their press-proclaimed prowess (Stokes, 2015; Wilson, 2005). The lack
of acceptance and adoration for their design ingenuity affects women’s self-efficacy and
impacting their career expectations for success (Eagly & Carli, 2007; Proudfoot et al., 2015;
Stokes, 2017). The expectation for male design success is framed by status quo transactional
traits, aligning control, competition, and agency with profit and power (Stokes, 2015; Vernier,
2018). As a result, women’s design success in the traditional industry channel remains
unsupported and nearly out of reach, leading many women to leave their jobs to seek their
fortune on their own (Furst & Reeves, 2008; Kephart & Schumacher, 2005).
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Fashion design’s creative allure is powerful and seductive. Creative fashion products are
inspirational and wearable for both the designer who imagines them and the consumer who
covets them. The draw for the aspiring designer is the opportunity to express wearable beauty in
fabric forms that can be desired and enjoyed, employing skills honed at the hearth. The global
industry has grown into an industrial giant trading on the skills of trained craftspeople, the
majority being female (Campos Franco et al., 2019). Many female designers struggle to find
their perfect career fit, and in frustration, choose to leave the industry altogether. At the same
time, other determined female designers step out on their own to battle the elusive practice
barriers armed with their skills, knowledge, and industry connections. As new entrepreneurs,
women suffer from financial investment disadvantages, a lack of mentors and role models, and
business training and education (Block & Tiertjen-Smith, 2016; Bynum, 2016; Mattis, 2004).
Women fashion entrepreneurs have started to share their stories encouraging young female
designers to follow their lead (Curwen et al., 2018; Hatcher & Nguyen Tu, 2017). Fashion
designers determined to set out on the entrepreneurial path will need to spin their creative
passion with a purposeful approach to product development to succeed in the industry moving
forward (Amen & Berg, 2021). Negotiating the complex value chain takes will and passion in
addition to a determination to deliver products grounded in purpose and made with responsible
processes. New business owners face a harsh reality beyond their control that can challenge their
self-efficacy, goals, and potential success if they meet the challenge alone.
Communal Roles and Reality
Stereotypic assumption assigns characteristic attributes to people as gleaned from societal
expectations. The expectation of roles according to gender has prejudiced occupational
expectations for women in creative and enterprising roles (Koenig & Eagly, 2014). The
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attribution of group engagement or communal engagement strongly aligns with assigned
stereotypes for women in all fields. In contrast, a prejudicial group role expectation for men is
attaining leadership roles in entrepreneurial and innovation roles (Eagly & Karau, 2002).
Women’s leadership and group collaboration can be understood by realizing that women's
behaviors are impacted by their self-esteem and their estimations of their skills and capability
(Debebe, 2011). In male-led organizations, male dominance is corrosive to women's self-
identified abilities, which exacerbates the talent acknowledgment and the role attribution issue
for women (Proudfoot et al., 2014). The suppression of women’s accomplishments and abilities
is a denial of their self-knowledge. Disregarding the gendering of women’s work environments
further constrains their opportunities for promotion and affirmation in their chosen fields
(Debebe, 2011).
Koenig and Eagly used SRT for their 2014 study to give evidence of stereotypes
associated with the observable behaviors of occupational roles. The findings illuminate the
expectation for male leadership across a variety of occupational roles, including those found in
the feminized fashion industry (Koenig & Eagly, 2014). The fashion industry role stereotype
supports men as geniuses ascending to the top positions of design and creative directors. Women
remain relegated disproportionally to the creative support roles of patternmaker, team designer,
and merchandiser (Stokes, 2015, 2017; Vander Ploeg & Lee, 2018). Expecting women and men
to stay in fashion’s preordained lanes has constrained innovation across industry practices.
Behavioral Expectations
Judgment of leaders by co-workers and subordinates can be harsh. Women in leadership
face leadership challenges due to their gender, the gender of those they direct, and the gender of
those to whom they report. In a feminized field, where promotions can be scarce, Queen Bees are
33
women seen to focus on their own success and unwilling to share the secrets of their success
with female peers and mentees (Rudman et al., 2012). Expectations of behaviors are generalized
into gender stereotypes (Eagly & Karau, 2002), resulting in an unfair backlash for women
leaders if they present stereotypical counter behaviors (Rudman et al., 2012). Backlash can lead
to a reassignment of leadership roles and the stigmatizing of women leaders by women
subordinates. Assessing women leaders as aggressive rather than caring can weave perceived
personality traits into a constructed leadership effectiveness story, undermining female
leadership (Braun et al., 2017; Rudman et al., 2012). A scarcity of female leaders has perpetuated
the role of the queen bee, pitting women against each other instead of working collaboratively.
Women successfully land and hold leadership roles in industries where the pay and promotional
opportunities are habitually lower (Braun et al., 2017; Furst & Reeves, 2008).
As men and women present themselves to their workplace, society has preassigned career
success with gender expectations, separate from education and expertise (Eagly & Karau, 2002;
Koenig & Eagly, 2014). Role congruity theory posits that regardless of skill or training, agentic
leadership traits are stereotypical of men, leading to prejudice against women possessing actual
agentic leadership traits. Business leadership was once the domain of men only, whose agentic
and transactional tendencies were the accepted and appropriate leadership traits for profit-based
commerce (Sajjad et al., 2015). Women leaders, conversely, are expected to embody communal
and transformational characteristics with an expectation of warmth and compliant behavior
(Schock et al., 2019).
Gendered behaviors reinforced through the cultural expectations of socially constructed
gender roles perpetuate leadership inequity (Eagly & Wood, 1999). The traditional gender binary
of male and female behaviors aligns with the culturally normative power roles for male
34
dominance and female compliance behaviors (Eagly & Johnannessen-Schmidt, 2001). Since the
first description of SRT (Eagly, 1987), the growing body of research has expanded to include
further stereotypical constraints found with intersectional positionality (Koenig & Eagly, 2014).
Men have carried the mantel of expectation: of leader, champion of change, entrepreneur,
innovator. The agentic behaviors of leadership are described as aggressive, competitive,
singularly focused, and driven by bottom-line outcomes (Eagly, 1987). Leadership beliefs have
given men the advantage in the workforce based upon the perspectives built on status quo legacy
practices (Braun et al., 2017). Women excel in competitive and often unstable industries where
their collaborative behaviors lead to successful outcomes ahead of expectations (Eagly &
Steffen, 1987). Additionally, women have risen to leadership roles replacing men, seen as the
cause of the organizational crisis (Furst & Reeves, 2008). Task-oriented transactional outcomes
require agentic behavioral approaches to leadership, while people-oriented tasks need a
communal and transformational leadership approach. Women leaders are as capable as their
male peers in performing task-oriented transactional roles due to their coordinated communal
approach to teamwork and group care (Braun et al., 2017.)
Female entrepreneurship is on the rise. Based on women's workforce experiences, women
have mitigated many career hampering barriers by starting their own enterprises (Kephart &
Schumacher, 2005). Armed with their individual values and knowledge, women bring their
empathy and expertise to found purposefully built organizations (Winn, 2005). Women identify
their reasons for choosing entrepreneurship as flexibility, creative autonomy, satisfaction,
potential income, and personal growth. Women often state their reasoning for starting a new
career as one to support their beliefs of building better practices and products. Women share that
they believe they will avoid the unsatisfying work experiences where they were unfulfilled and
35
frustrated by creating their own values-based enterprises (Weiler & Bernasek, 2015; Winn,
2005). Personal values, individual belief systems, and aesthetics goals are the construction
materials used to build sustainable fashion enterprises (Heitzmann & Liu, 2018).
Personality Traits at Work
The conversation around leadership and personality traits is charged. Introverts are often
bowled over in meetings, their reflected careful thoughts often dismissed by the extroverts at the
table acknowledged by their vocal status quo reasoning (Cain, 2012). Extroverted business
leaders are seen as boldly pursuing short term rewards, yet such overt behavior can lead to
financial disasters leaving long term impacts and leadership questions. In contrast to true
extroverts, pseudo-extroverts and omni-verts masquerade as bold leaders when their voices are
needed (Cain, 2012; Little, 2020). Cain further explored how pseudo-extroverts quickly revert to
their introverted true selves, often retreating immediately after speechmaking and performative
events (2012). In the last two decades the brashness of the top-down bold leader as the only true
has been challenged by a more reflective, measured, and innovative style of leadership (Cain,
2012; Huszco & Engel, 2017; Little, 2020).
Sustainability: Reforming Social Roles
The $3.2 trillion-dollar fashion industry is everywhere, leaving its manufacturing imprint
on the far corners of the world. Sustainable change is emerging throughout each stage of the
fashion industry’s value chain (Ertekin et al., 2020; Molderez & Van Elst, 2015). For the change
to stick, organizational mission statements and hiring practices must align with the design studio
ideation processes while supporting the materials and process choices made by the supply chain
partners (Molderez & Van Elst, 2015). Organizational planning decisions that are key to driving
sustainability scope and scale business choices will need to be made by leaders who are authentic
36
to their values, communal in their inclusion of their followers, and aware of the importance of
implementing practice change (Hopkins & O’Neil, 2015). Women are emerging as key in the
sustainability movement at all levels, expanding the pipeline for more women filling leadership
roles (Hepler, 2016). Fashion’s female sustainability leaders fit the description of authentic
leadership, women who are self-aware and aligned with positive ethical and moral understanding
of the timely pressures driving the need for practice change (Hopkins & O’Neil, 2015;
Roshitshu, 2019). Sustainable fashion leadership has spun its processes with intentional,
collaborative transparency, blending with the attributes of communal and transformational
guidance that nurture long-term productivity (Heitzmann & Liu, 2018). On the other hand,
fashion’s business leadership falls under the authority of men, who use their control and pressure
to influence product outcomes that satisfy the demanding bottom line.
Transactional Expectations
The pressure of an organization’s bottom line profit requirements overshadows its ethical
choices and intentions. Fashion is a transactional industry, a precarious and volatile business
with a profit-centered product focus driven by bottom line results (Brandenburg et al., 2020).
Fashion businesses founded on profit and loss models have built expectations that direct daily
choices and actions (Ertekin et al., 2020; Oelze, 2017).
Transactional practices of the industry have led to the marginalization of women gaining
equality across the supply chain (Martin et al., 2016). The male-dominated and directed industry
has unleashed a rainbow of abuses on the planet's finite resources under the influence of narrow
business interests (Banerjee, 2008; Heitzmann & Liu, 2018). Women concerned about
sustainability are concerned for the future of humanity and the wellbeing of the planet
(Samuelson, 2018). Women leading the sustainability field have witnessed the practice injustices
37
firsthand, or they have studied them from afar (Heitzmann & Liu, 2018). Numerous studies of
the apparel and textiles supply chains have determined that the transactional growth years of
global product development have caused the environmental issues seen across the planet (Amen
& Berg, 2018, 2021; Banerjee, 2008; Ellen MacArthur Foundation, 2017; Greenpeace, 2020;
McKinsey, 2020; Quantis, 2108). The waste streams have created toxic waters, polluted air, and
steaming landfills (Ellen MacArthur Foundation, 2017; Greenpeace, 2020). The practices
employed in generating apparel, textiles, accessories have overproduced materials and
components that have decimated natural resources and overwhelmed waste management
structures. (Amen & Berg 2018, 2021; Quantis, 2108). Green leadership without foundational
practice understanding has given rise to greenwash marketing, raising concern about how the
industry will implement transformation (Heitzmann & Liu, 2018).
Sustainable practices’ high financial impacts are the default reasoning leading to industry
inaction in transactionally based organizations (Sajjad et al., 2015). The fashion industry
struggles when faced with the choice of responsible practices at a higher cost and resource
consumption impacts. The struggle intensifies when the choice impacts overall market share,
stakeholders, and business structures (Amen & Berg, 2021; Sajjad et al., 2015). The last decade
brought heightened awareness of humanity's impact on the planet's resources. Consumer
awakening challenges the industrial status quo making it impossible for fashion leaders to ignore
the environmental and human toll compounded by decades of manufacturing choices (Amen &
Berg 2021; Ellen MacArthur Foundation, 2017; Greenpeace, 2018; Kennedy & Kray, 2014).
Business choices of industry leadership become ethical choices as they fold into the material and
process choices made by supply chain and sourcing team members tasked with generating
product volume for a predetermined price standard (Hoyt et al., 2010). Fashion will need to
38
remake itself as a responsible industry sustaining planetary resources, achieving social equity
while remaining economically viable (Hanson, 2010). The business of fashion has choices to
consider.
The industry choices endangering planetary resources are the decisions built by profit-
centric manufacturing processes established generations ago (Molderez & Van Elst, 2015). The
conventional industry’s manufacturing choices are normalized by the profit structures
implemented throughout fashion’s business practices (Roberts, 2003). The sustainability
movement's manufacturing choices are based on the correction of scaled production, resource
consumption, and workforce engagement. It is disconcerting that people’s choices lead to toxic
waterways, desertification of once fertile soils, and microplastics floating in the oceans.
Fashion’s production choices are ethical choices (Kennedy & Kray, 2014). Business morality is a
dilemma for women, whose communal behavioral traits hold them to the societal expectation of
inherent good, making the ideal ethical compromise unacceptable (Eagly & Steffen, 1987;
Kennedy & Kray, 2014). Across numerous industries, brands with high market visibility loom
large as targets for grassroots activist groups. Women are rising to fill the leadership voids left
by the scandals generated by ethical malfeasance (Furst & Reeves, 2008).
Though acknowledged as essential to the continued economic development in emerging
nations, women's reality is their voices are silenced by the voices of men (Shinbrot et al., 2019).
Women’s hesitancy to share their perspectives exists in professional offices, boardrooms, and the
factory floor (Syna & Costea, 2015). This issue is complicated in countries where women suffer
inequality and discrimination due to cultural and religious expectations. The International Labor
Organization (ILO) research shares that in countries where subservience is expected, women
silently fill the jobs that men will not take because men have the authority to speak out against
39
workplace abuses (ILO, 2017). Traditional role expectations complicate women's good
intentions to bring change to male-dominated industries (Eagly & Carli, 2007; Shinbrot et al.,
2019). With a global workforce that is 80% female, the global supply chain’s impact on rural
communities' health and well-being is questioned (Campos Franco et al., 2019; Oelze, 2017).
Female employees are managed and directed in male-dominated societies and industries, and
gender inequity undermines the value of their employment (Oelze, 2017). Fashion’s supply chain
reality shackles 48 million women to low-level jobs offering little opportunity for growth or
escape (Amen & Berg, 2018; Stevenson & Cole, 2018). The supply chain jobs held by women
require a docile yet skilled labor force able to produce but expected not to complain (ILO, 2017).
Women’s awareness of industrial development imprints left on the earth and its peoples, coupled
with the long-range perspective of needed practice change, has encouraged sustainability’s
female leadership (Benstead et al., 2020). Women’s ability to collaborate and cooperate
translates to better business outcomes in male-dominated industries (Shinbrot et al., 2019).
Women-led brands and organizations have banded together to raise consumer and industry
awareness of ongoing unethical industry practices (Benstead et al., 2020; Stevenson & Cole,
2018; Roberts, 2003).
Transformational Changes
The leadership traits ascribed to women are those of warm and caring people-focused
communal practices. Eagly and Johannessen-Schmidt (2001) determined that women do lead
from a position of collective empathy. Women’s concern for their fellow workers, be the worker
a peer, a follower, or leader, is at the core of their being. Regardless of the call for transactional
or transformational task-oriented behaviors, women leaders excel by combining agentic and
communal behavioral traits (Eagly & Johannessen-Schmidt, 2001). Fashion’s need for role
40
models and mentorship is real. Women leaders excel in bringing their concern for excellence
through engagement with teamwork and collaborative output (Eagly & Johannessen Schmidt,
2001). In the role of innovator leader, women possessing a democratic style of transformational
and communal leadership rise above that of the agentic leader using a brainstorming approach to
creativity (Eagly & Carli, 2007). Female role models and mentorship is critical for instilling
confidence in women with aspirations of future leadership roles (Block & Tietjen-Smith, 2016;
Mattis, 2004). For the women leading fashion's sustainability actions, democratic collaboration
has been vital in their success (Roshitshu, 2019). Sustainability practices need to be accepted
broadly to bring transformative change within the fashion industry, requiring intentional
collaboration across the global value chain (Abraham, 2020; Amed & Berg 2021; Heitzmann &
Liu, 2018). For successful sustainability implementation across brands and throughout the
complex supply chain stages, the opaque practice structures need to fade away to allow for
transparent and collaborative process transformation.
Fashion's sustainability movement is noted for its transparent practices, highlighting
brand, label, and cross-organizational collaborative efforts focused on solving manufacturing's
legacy imprint (Amen & Berg, 2019; Malik Chua, 2021). However, the expectations for positive
business outcomes often conflict with the goal of positive social practices (Amen & Berg, 2021).
Where traditional fashion practice has stumbled over profit and loss structures, the sustainable
fashion movement strives to reimagine manufacturing practices based on values and responsible
product manufacturing (Heitzmann & Liu, 2018). Collaboration has been a tenant for the
successful integration of sustainable practices in many industries. Collaboration has been the
antithesis of traditional fashion industry practice. Protecting specialized processes, resources, and
41
techniques from the competition helps keep a brand's proprietary aesthetic from being stolen and
copied, resulting in a diluted market value (Caniato et al., 2012).
The women filling today's top sustainability organization teams and boards represent a
vast array of professional experience garnered from careers spent across the industry's brands,
labels, and enterprises (Sustainable Apparel Coalition [SAC], 2021; Sustainable Brands, 2021;
Textile Exchange [TE], 2021). Their lived experiences gave shape to the values guiding their
roles in the sustainability movement. The leaders of organizations focused on delivering product
outcomes and employing people-centered supply chains need communal, caring, and
collaborative traits. The fashion and fashion textiles industries need leaders with strong
communal behavioral traits willing to collaborate to transform the legacy transaction-based
processes into responsibly enacted procedures. The development of the HIGG index, an essential
sustainability assessment tool, was developed after strategy sessions bringing together industry
sustainability leaders who worked together to understand the industry’s product development
gaps (Radhakrishnan, 2014). The collaboration clarified intentional best practices choices
derived from personal and organizational vision and values. With the establishment of the
Sustainable Apparel Coalition (SAC), sustainable industry standards continue to evolve under
focused female leadership (Malik Chua, 2020).
Intentions and Values
Personal values underpin professional attitudes and direct organizational actions.
Assumptions of higher material and process costs constrict the implementation of sustainability
practices (Brandenburg et al., 2020; Oelze, 2017). The sustainable fashion movement is
developing new ideologies and systems to reform the legacy methodologies founded on the
industry’s profit focused bottom line business structures (Park & Kim, 2016). Sustainable
42
materials and processes have incremental costs for the traditional bottomline. Re-envisioning
fashion’s business design and using a triple bottom line (TBL) structure incorporating
environmental and social dimensions with the economic factors will purposefully support
fashion’s transformation (Amen & Berg, 2019, 2021). Individuals’ values are the foundation of
their expressions of effort (Heitzmann & Liu, 2018; Molderez & Van Elst, 2015; Samuelson,
2018). People’s belief systems shape and manifest their career expectations, seen as an
underlying explanation for career outcomes and success, obscuring perseverance and work ethic
(Heitzmann & Liu, 2018). Female leaders' propensity for challenging work and communal traits
meets the fundamental leadership requirements for sustainability transformation of the
manufacturing supply chain.
Creative intentions can contrast practice success when business experience and financial
acumen challenge self-efficacy (Fashion Design, 2022). Fashion design education is focused on
technical skills training and explorative conceptual education without more than basic
entrepreneurial lessons. A lack of business training can challenge confidence, leading to
trepidation when seeking business support, especially for women (Auster & Prasad, 2016;
National Women's Business Council [NWBC], 2017). Fashion incubators arrived on the scene in
the United States and Europe beginning in the early 2000’s with the goal of supporting local
fashion entrepreneurship (Fashion Incubator San Francisco [FiSF], 2011). Fashion startups face
challenges of established industry business structures including profit and loss models, seasonal
calendaring, capital intensive initial investments, as well as a lack of founder business
knowledge (Clark, 2012; Roepe, 2017). Add to the equation, gendered business expectations, and
women fashion founders find themselves shut out of funding and hope (Clark, 2012; Dodd,
2012; Leitch et al., 2018). The potential for accelerators, incubators, and online training is huge,
43
and especially for future female entrepreneurs (Dezsö & Ross, 2012; Dhaliwal, 2020; Hunt et al.,
2019). Expanding business training for women paves the way for sustainability business training
as well.
The scholarly research on sustainable industry practices is limited, and more is needed to
amplify the possible practical opportunities for change. Two identified disparate areas for
successful sustainable practice implementation are the vast traditional organizations need
determined practice change to remain viable in the current fashion market and the small to mid-
sized privately held brands or labels (Molderez & Van Elst, 2015). Alabama Chanin and Eileen
Fisher are two successful sustainable fashion businesses with complex stories to share (Curwen
et al., 2012; Hatcher & Nguyen Tu, 2017).
Curwen et al. (2012) explored the sustainability efforts of the Eileen Fisher brand and
identified the firm's challenges with implementation. How an organization defines sustainable
actions must weave throughout its entire product cycle. The end product goals set in motion a
complicated chain of events beginning with the design conceptualization choices that wind
through to the final product development (Curwen et al., 2012). The Eileen Fisher company,
founded in 1984, is by fashion industry standards a midsized brand with reported annual revenue
of $210 million and is 35% employee-owned (Samuelson, 2018). The Eileen Fisher brand is
committed to both sustainable social and environmental issues. The choices are at the center of
the Eileen Fisher business today, stemming from the personal values of its founder, majority
owner, and creative director of the brand that bears her name. Key is the intention and vision of
the leader to bring sustainability to the center of a business, to build a company with the people
of the brand in mind rather than the extended reach for more profits (Curwen et al., 2012). When
given a chance to sell the brand to a more significant business, Fisher refused the offer because
44
the products and the values were not critical to the potential buyer, only the profit and the supply
chain engagement (Samuelson, 2018). Sustainability choices can be tough decisions, yet when
made by authentic leaders whose beliefs and values are foundational for the brand or
organization’s fundamental values, the sustainability choices are unquestionably the right
choices (Curwen et al., 2018).
Fashion designer Natalie Chanin’s business efforts brought back apparel jobs to rural
Florence, Alabama, where the combination of sustainable practices and a cottage industry model
have energized the local community (Hatcher & Nguyen Tu, 2017). Alabama Chanin business
uses the hand sewing techniques used in the quilt making from the area. The aesthetic is specific
and cannot be replicated by mass production manufacturing methods, ensuring the garments’
verifiable authenticity. The retail prices of each garment reflect the artisan efforts incorporated
into each piece and the designer’s brand intention (Hatcher & Nguyen Tu, 2017). A sustainable
fashion design business offers luxury apparel defined by its aesthetic and ethical values (Curwen
et al., 2018). Driving factors for sustainable fashion success are the alignment of business goals
with the personal and communal values of the team inspired by passion and creative intention
over profit and power (Heitzmann and Liu, 2018, Samuelson, 2018).
Conceptual Framework
The conceptual framework for this study builds on social role theory (SRT) (Eagly, 1987)
as the research underpinning for understanding how mismatched gender roles expectations and
societal constraints woven through the legacy fashion industry practices have given rise to the
sustainable fashion movement lead by women. SRT framework defines male and female
workplace roles along three pillars of gender attributes: evolved physical and behavioral
differences, psychological factors, and social roles expectations according to pre-assigned
45
societal norms organized around a male and female gender binary. SRT posits that adult career
aspirations, dictated by presumed social role expectations in an organizational context, affect the
potential strengths and or limitations of one gender over another (Eagly, 1987). The SRT
framework identifies the traditional industry's imbalanced division of labor across gender lines,
revealing how accepted jobs and potential leadership roles are limited by cultural socialization.
The conceptual framework further expands the SRT to investigate how the gender attributions
that have suppressed women's success in the traditional industry are the behavioral traits that
have propelled them forward in fashion's sustainability movement. Gender appropriate
assignation of career roles underscores the inequitable leadership opportunities afforded women
in traditional fashion companies (Stokes, 2015).
Societal role constructs exist in numerous feminized industries, including fashion. The
fashion industry is designated as a feminized industry because the dominant majority of
employees building the products and the consumers for whom the products are developed and
purchased are women (Stokes, 2017). The traditional fashion industry's established practice roles
have historically constrained gender role behaviors and restricted career opportunities for women
(Stokes, 2017). The limited career advancement of women in the fashion industry parallels
women's job limitations in other feminized fields (Auster & Prasad, 2016; Schneider & Bos,
2019). The United States' fashion industry workforce is dominated by women filling the roles of
patternmaker, sample sewer, and the lower to mid-range creative roles in design and product
development (Pike, 2016; Stolz & Kane, 2015). The reality of fashion's gendered labor division
aligns with SRT's premise of societal role expectations for both men and women working in
traditional industry roles.
46
Fashion's sustainability movement emerged over the last two decades (Bottani et al.,
2020), championed by women who have spent their time working in the field questioning the
daily product development activities. The sustainability roles within both fashion and textiles are
being created and defined as the movement grows within the industry and affects practice change
(Malik Chua, 2021). New leadership opportunities are emerging within the fashion and textiles
industry as the locus of practice shifts. The most experienced candidates are filling the Chief
Sustainability Officer (CSO) and sustainable entrepreneurship roles, and these candidates are
often women.
This study follows the tenant that a research study's conceptual framework illustrates the
researcher's best path for exploring the study problem and the relationship between the study
variables (Grant & Osanloo, 2014). In alignment with social role theory, this study's conceptual
framework entwined the evolved differences in practice, the beliefs and behavioral,
psychological factors, and social roles with the legacy practices found in traditional fashion daily
actions and the activities of fashion's sustainability movement processes. The legacy behaviors
found in fashion brands, labels, and organizations have formed the career role expectations for
the people who work in the field and have guided the study's research plan. Figure 1 illustrates
the conceptual framework embodying the study philosophy of gender social role impacts of the
traditional and sustainable fashion industry.
47
Figure 1
Conceptual Framework
Conclusion
The traditional fashion industry has been acknowledged for gender bias, human-rights
abuses globally, and natural resource degradation (Amen & Berg 2018, 2021; EPA, 2020;
Stevenson & Cole, 2018; Stokes, 2015). However, female leaders in the sustainable textile and
apparel manufacturing sector are challenging the traditional industry's processes to ensure
equitably and responsible behaviors become the new status quo worldwide. The women who are
stepping in to bring change to the industry’s destructive manufacturing practices are working
collaboratively across the complex value chain to shift the supply chain impacts with the
implementation of sustainable procedures (Bottani et al., 2020; Roberts, 2003; Roshitsh, 2019).
48
These are the leaders who correct the perception of industry leadership by addressing male
dominance by crafting themselves as the leaders of fashion's sustainability movement.
49
Chapter Three: Methodology
The purpose of the study is to understand the experiences of female leaders in the
sustainable fashion movement. The study uncovers how the female leaders navigated industry
barriers and brought actionable sustainability changes to the feminized field. Chapter Three
outlines the design of the research study and shares the description of the study's selected
participants. The theoretical and conceptual frameworks are reshared in this section to illustrate
how they construct the platform for the study. A description and identification of the data
collection operations and instrumentation are provided. Lastly, the crafted data analysis structure
ensures that appropriate ethical considerations were implemented for the safety and
confidentiality of the participants.
Research Questions
In order to understand the drivers for women taking the lead in the sustainable fashion
sector, the following research questions guide the study:
1. To what degree are women emerging as the leaders of the sustainable fashion movement?
2. What factors have inspired sustainable fashion's female leaders to transcend society's role
barriers to become leaders of change?
3. To what extent will sustainable fashion's female leaders become the role models for
industry practice innovation?
Overview of Design
This phenomenological field study uses a qualitative approach to capture the in-depth and
personal career tales in the words of the participants (Creswell & Creswell, 2018). The three
research questions serve as the guide for the data collection research methodology. The
appropriate research methodology for gaining first-hand insight and understanding of the lived
50
experiences of sustainable fashion' female leaders is through qualitative interviews (Merriam &
Tisdell, 2016). The qualitative phenomenological field study interviews will occur with 12-15
industry-identified female leaders from the sustainability sector of the fashion, textiles, and
media industries. Empirical data seen in institutional reports, organizational and social media
artifacts will support the interview findings (Creswell & Creswell, 2018). Qualitative interviews
are an essential method for understanding how each of these women navigated their careers,
mitigating industry barriers and, despite the industry’s pervasive gender role boundaries,
emerging as the sustainability movement’s innovation leaders. The interviews in this study seek
to provide instruction from the stories of career experiences and to inspire readers to become
future leaders.
Research Setting
This phenomenological field study seeks to share the lived experience stories of female
leaders working in sustainability in the fashion, textiles, and media industries. This field study
shares the knowledge of a group of women leaders regarding their career backgrounds. The 14
participants have an array of educational training and work credentials. Only 2.7% of the global
industry's creative directors are female (Stokes, 2015). Women leaders populate the top
organizations and foundations, working to change the industry's practice behaviors in the
sustainability sector. There are no official gender leadership studies attached to the sustainability
movement considering why women stepped forward as change agents and into leadership roles.
Interviewing the current female leaders unwound both how and why these women pledged to
transform the product manufacturing industries while untangling the complicated web that led
them to push their careers beyond the traditional industry conventions and into the fashion and
textiles sustainability movement.
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The Researcher
My positionality is tied directly to this study. It is essential that this study be grounded in
industry knowledge and share the participant's career lived experiences (Maxwell, 2013). My
positionality aligns with the chosen participants' positionality and strengthens my understanding
of the gathered research (Creswell & Creswell, 2018). As a cisgender White woman with a
fashion design and fashion education career spanning 38 years, I endured an industry’s gender
bias in creative studio practice and art and design academia. The bias manifested in a lack of pay,
promotion oversight, financial investment, and abusively inappropriate behavior. As a designer
and design director, I worked for brands, including my label, creating products for the North
American, Japanese, and European markets. My products’ development included materials and
yarns made from fibers gathered and processed in the British Isles, Europe, Southeast Asia,
Turkey, and Israel. The garments were manufactured in the United States, South Korea, Taiwan,
R.O.C, Hong Kong, Macau, Indonesia, and India. Having worked in factories with supply chain
agents and on the factory floor with craftspeople and technicians, I have witnessed industry
practices and behavior first-hand.
My experience as a female fashion designer, fashion educator, and industry mentor led
me directly to this subject. I hope this study will uncover best practices that can help future
leaders mitigate any discrepant behaviors. I was vigilant with each interview, making sure to not
lead the conversation for the purposes of the study but to allow each interviewee to unfold their
experienced truth. The interview questions and protocol have been reviewed and corrected
according to five cohort peer reviews checking for author bias and assumptions. Notes were
taken during the interview conversations unwind, and reflective journal entries were made
immediately following each interview session.
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The interview conversations used the peer-reviewed interview questions, and their
corresponding prompts created for this study. Verbatim transcripts made from the interviews’
audio recordings and the transcripts were shared, reviewed, and approved with and by each
respondent. Two pilot interviews evaluated the line of questioning for ethics and appropriateness
to ensure that the participants would be comfortable with the questions and would be able to stop
the interviews should they feel at all uncomfortable with continuing the session. I hope this study
will lead to best practices to ensure future leaders will no longer have to wind their way through
a convoluted career maze to avoid abusive behaviors and inequities. Each participant was
encouraged to give rich responses that allow for purposeful diversity and variation in the survey
responses.
Data Sources
The dissertation study research gathered during interviews conducted with 14 women
who migrated from relative obscurity in their areas of expertise in the traditional industry and
emerged as leaders in the sustainability movement within the field. These women are known as
leaders and change-making practitioners. The dissertation participants were purposefully
sampled for the study because of their specific practice knowledge and involvement. The criteria
for participation included the participant’s gender, field experience, and industry leadership roles
(Maxwell, 2013). Each shared experiential story expanded the understanding of the core causes
underlying the problem of practice to help unpack the study's research questions (Creswell &
Creswell, 2018).
The method for research capture for this study was participant interviews. Interviews
capture the lived experience stories of the respondents in their own words, sharing their
perspectives and memories offering the contextual information needed in gathering data for
53
phenomenological research (Merriam & Tisdell, 2016). Study participants were interviewed and
questioned about their careers to uncover the professional realities female leaders face in the
sustainable fashion movement. In addition, the women were queried as to their experiences in the
conventional industry practice and their participation in the sustainability movement. The
interviews were conducted via computer and used video and audio recordings with explicit
participant permission. The interviews commenced in September 2021 and were completed by
October 2021.
Participants
All participants are personally known or were introduced to me through my industry
network. My fashion sustainability network was established while I served as the chair of the
only fashion design program in the United States of America with a sustainable foundation and
as a member of an advisory board for a global sustainability association. Due to their deep
knowledge of conventional industry practices and their leadership roles in sustainability, the
study participants are uniquely qualified to reflect on the similarities and differences between
sustainability and traditional industry modes. Each of these women lead divisions, brands, or
organizations known in sustainable product development spheres, and each possesses specific
sustainability wisdom. The participants' prior professional experience spans numerous areas of
engagement within the fashion and textiles industries. The participants were contacted via email
to confirm their participation in the study.
Each of the interviewees willingly participated according to the study parameters.
Pseudonyms protect the participants and their organizations, allowing for anonymity in the data
collection for the study. The anonymity of the gathered data and the study participants
54
encourages expanded information sharing to support equity in the feminized field. In addition,
the study data offers guidance for future female leaders in the sustainable fashion movement.
Instrumentation
With informed consent obtained from the participants, the data gathered during
computer-recorded video interviews were integrated into the dissertation. The semi-structured
interview protocol consists of a minimum of 16 primary questions and corresponding prompts
that investigate the confronted barriers, the feelings, motivation, and persistence involved in the
work experiences of each participant. In addition, the interview questions sought to uncover the
women's perspectives of their career path choices, inclusive of any detours or shifts they made
along their career pathway in fashion's industry labyrinth. The study interview protocol is
included in Appendix A and in Table A1.
The theoretical framework used for framing this study is social role theory (SRT). SRT
was first described by Alice H. Eagly (1987). The conceptual framework builds on the three
pillars of SRT:
1. Evolved differences as related to expectations for workforce involvement.
2. Psychological factors related to feelings of capability, self-efficacy, and the imposter
phenomenon.
3. Social roles themselves as determined by the communities, workplaces, and organizations
where the women work.
The design of the interview questions allowed for discernment in participant responses,
enriching the feedback as it applies to the study's research questions.
At this point in fashion's history, gender bias awareness and manufacturing impaction are
acknowledged in the industry press as well as the industry's top organizational echelons (Amen
55
& Berg, 2020, 2021; Brown et al., 2018; Friedman, 2015, 2018). The personal histories of female
sustainability leaders provide insight for future career navigation for women seeking fashion
leadership roles. Understanding what led women to leave traditional fashion practices and enter
the sustainability sector demonstrates the best way to empower women to bring industry change.
Data Collection Procedures
The participant interviews began in September 2021 and concluded by the end of October
2021. Each of the one-on-one participant interviews was scheduled for one hour. The interview
conversations took place using the on-screen computer video and audio application Zoom,
allowing the participants to engage from their preferred locations. Each of the study participants
indicated they were comfortable using the Zoom application for the study interviews. The Zoom
computer application transcribed each of the interview interactions. At the beginning of each
interview, the participants gave their consent for both the audio and video recording of their
interview sessions. The recordings began after explicit consent from the participant was received.
Each recording was saved to a password-protected server. The transcribed transcripts were
reviewed and verified for accuracy by each participant. After reviewing each interview
transcript, follow-up interviews were scheduled when clarification or expanded questioning was
required. Thus, participants had the opportunity to review their individual transcripts for
accuracy, enabling credible study results. Three years after the study concluded, the transcripts
will be destroyed.
The fashion and textile industry uses specialized terminology identifiable to those
working in the industry. With over three decades of experience in the field, the language of
fashion and manufacturing systems is well known to me. Terminology was verified during the
interviews ensuring that the language used in the interviews has mutually agreed definitions.
56
Researcher notes taken during the interviews captured the immediate impressions of the
unfolding stories. Reflective journaling followed each discussion to ensure that any thoughts and
observations from the interviews were processed and added to the dissertation immediately
following each recorded conversation. These reflective notes were included with the interview
data in analysis. Formal analysis of the collected interviews occurred after all the interviews
were complete, and the participants reviewed their transcripts in October of 2021.
Data Analysis
Data analysis develops an understanding of a study’s collected data (Merriam & Tisdell,
2016). The study’s data was analyzed according to the Creswell and Creswell (2018) eight-step
coding process upon completion of the member checking step. Each of the individual interview
transcripts and recordings was read in step one, followed by notetaking and reflective review
identifying meaningful content. The third step of analyzing each transcript for emergent themes,
commences with list making and organizing the themes according to topics and importance. The
fourth step codes the transcripts for categorical alignment and new understanding emergent from
the actual data collection. Following, step five works to map adjacent themes and emergent
relationships from the interview data, where the final three steps are to analyze the findings
according to the themes and to review and recode to the refined data structures (Creswell &
Creswell, 2018). The study uncovered essences in the everyday experiences of the participants
that align with similar experiences of the other interviewees (Merriam & Tisdell, 2016). The
categorization and coding organization will coordinate with the study's conceptual framework
and the research questions. This study sought to understand the underlying structures of the
participant's career experiences that align to a sustainable fashion career path. The interview
questions uncovered the perspectives of the female interviewees as to any daily practice job
57
impacts that may or may not have inspired their careers and leadership trajectory. This
phenomenological study offers a reflective composite description of the women and their
sustainability-focused work.
Interview Method
This study comprises a series of individual semi-structured interviews held with female
leaders working in the sustainability arena. Prior to the interviews, the participants were assigned
pseudonyms to protect their identity, and any identifying information shared during the recorded
interviews was redacted. The interviewer’s name, dates, and times of each interview were
entered into the corresponding recordings to support the organization of the interview data
collection. A reflective examination of my own career experiences for awareness of personal
biases and assumptions as well as for any emotional triggering was conducted before beginning
the data collection stage (Maxwell, 2013; Merriam & Tisdell, 2016). The heuristic inquiry of the
participants’ reflective experiences was included as a part of the data.
The questions were broken into content blocks enabling complete information collection
and post-interview analysis (Merriam & Tisdell, 2016). Analysis of the transcripts was according
to topical themes, with the emergent themes identified and sorted conforming to the conceptual
framework sections. Three macro themes emerged from the data analysis. The macro themes
were further broken into categorical subthemes that supported the research questions and aligned
with the theoretical frameworks a priori codes. The sorting of data into specific categories is an
inductive process that aligns the conceptual framework pillars with the blocks of expected data
from the researcher's perspective (Merriam & Tisdell, 2016). Each category corresponds to the
research purpose, and each category is mutually exclusive to the data fitting the section. The data
categories are exhaustive and complete as well as topically sensitive. A data chart expressing the
58
collection expectation of conceptual congruence with fully developed and refined themes
representing the gathered data is shared in the following chapter. The interviews were coded to
uncover expected, surprising, and unusual code concepts, all of which helped unpack any
triggers and unintentional responses.
Validity and Reliability
To provide credibility and trustworthiness of the study, member checking of transcripts,
researcher reflexivity, peer reviews, and thorough descriptions assured the understanding of
context and findings. The study’s fourth chapter shares the interview data and findings. In
addition, the participants’ shared data was confirmed by reviewing LINKEDIN resumes, resume
data of participants, and organizational memberships, further establishing the trustworthiness of
the gathered information. As compared to the participants’ shared data, industry organizational
membership was reviewed, confirming the lived experiences data's timing and titles, and
solidifying the participant’s career and practice involvement. The interview transcript data was
shared with each participant to verify the transcribed interviews’ gathered data matching the
participants’ lived experiences (Merriam & Tisdell, 2016). The questions in the study were peer-
reviewed by five doctoral peers and run through two pilot interviews for confirmation of logic
and appropriateness of the questions and language (Maxwell, 2013). Reflexive journaling helped
to confirm the researcher's impressions during the interviews and supported the study findings.
Ethics
This project is grounded in industry knowledge and shares each participant’s career lived
experiences. The interview questions have been peer-reviewed and pilot-tested to check
researcher bias and ensure an ethical line of questioning. Opening interview questions allowed
participants to comfortably engage with the interview process and support their study
59
involvement. The interviews started after each participant indicated they understood the purpose
and methods used in the interview. Each participant verbally consented to the interviews and
signed consent documentation for inclusive participation after the interview processes and
procedures of the engagement. An explanation of the study’s purpose, intention, and use was
shared with each participant. The participants were instructed that they may stop the interview
immediately should answering any of the questions be uncomfortable for the participant
(Merriam & Tisdell, 2016). The same set of interview questions served as the base for each
participant, allowing for purposeful diversity and variation in the interviews. Data collection
boundaries set by the interview questions relate to the study’s research questions to support the
validity and reliability of the interview and data collection (Merriam & Tisdell, 2016). The study
diligently followed the university’s institutional review board (IRB) procedures for ethical
conduct in research. The university’s IRB offices reviewed the study's methodology, confirmed
the appropriate standards for research practice were incorporated into the study protocol, and
awarded ethics approval.
After each interview, written thoughts, feelings, and concerns were recorded into
reflexive journals and included in the study's data analysis. In addition, choices made during the
data collection and data analysis phases were included in the research notes, allowing for review
and replication of the interview steps. Potential identified limitations could lead to further
research opportunities exploring the experiential realities of the women leading fashion’s
sustainability movement. This study hopes that more women will be empowered to lead industry
implementation of best practices, unencumbered by the inequitable career maze honed by
decades of male gender bias.
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Summary
This chapter is an overview of the qualitative phenomenological field study methodology
and data analysis used to implement this research study. The following chapter presents the
study's findings as related to the research questions. The data collection findings and an
examination of their meanings were reviewed for their relationship to the study's purpose.
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Chapter Four: Findings
The purpose of this phenomenological quantitative field study is to understand better how
the lived career experiences led to women ascending as the leaders of the sustainable fashion
industry. Chapter Four unfolds the data aligned with the study’s research questions crafted from
the social role theory's framework structures of evolved differences, beliefs, behaviors, and
social roles (Eagly & Wood, 1999). The conceptual framework revealed factors of gender,
industry barriers, and self-efficacy as determinants for guiding understanding of the phenomenon
of sustainable fashion's female leadership. The purpose of this chapter is to investigate the
phenomenon of female sustainable fashion leadership through the reflected tales of women
making their mark beyond the confines of fashion's male-dominated practice shifts.
Data Collection and Analysis
The semi-structured interviews reflect the 14 participants’ tenured awareness of the
industry's cultural limitations. Their included thoughts focus on the industry's involvement across
gender barriers, sustainability, navigation strategies, leadership, personality traits, and behavioral
expectations. Three key a priori codes: Evolved Differences, Beliefs and Actionized Behaviors,
and Social Roles were garnered from the social role theory theoretical framework pillars and
established the coding guideposts. The study's macro themes, crafted of the a priori codes and
comprehensive open codes, address each of the study’s three research questions. Female
Leadership, Factors for Navigating Change, and Engaged Role Modeling are the three
overarching themes used for analyzing the study data. The study’s scope has been narrowed with
refined themes to help prevent extraneous findings (Ravitch & Carl, 2021). The study’s findings
are presented in sections addressing each research question. Each research question is analyzed
according to the finding’s themes underpinned by the guiding conceptual framework. Figure 2
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provides an illustration of the research themes aligned to the research questions and the
conceptual framework.
Figure 2
Research Themes
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The sustainable fashion movement is led overwhelmingly by women who desire to shift
the prevalent manufacturing actions imparting social injustice, resource depletion, and
environmental degradation across the global industry. Women are rising to power as industry
practice change agents by breaking through the gender barriers that have hampered female
success for decades (Curwen et al., 2012; Hatcher & Nguyen Tu, 2017; Roshitsh, 2019). As
women move up into higher positions of influence, societal and industry expectations are being
pushed aside by sustainable fashion’s actions beyond the non-status-quo actions challenging the
feminized industry’s traditional social role assumptions. To determine why women are leading
sustainable fashion's charge, the following research questions were created and shaped by the
conceptual framework:
1. To what degree are women emerging as the leaders of the sustainable fashion movement?
2. What factors have inspired sustainable fashion's female leaders to transcend society’s role
barriers to become leaders of change?
3. To what extent will sustainable fashion's female leaders become the role models for
industry practice innovation?
The interview protocol is presented in Appendix A. The 16 interview questions align with
the theoretical framework’s tenants are indicated in the protocol matrix and Table A1. The
interview conversations explored the participants’ opinions and feelings of their work
experiences, leadership, and mentorship. In addition, the interviews revealed individual beliefs
regarding personality traits and societal expectations while uncovering each woman’s technique
for gathering her power to forge ahead through fashion's complicated status quo maze.
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Description of the Participants
The purposefully sampled 14 participants for this study are women acknowledged in the
industry as change-making leaders, respected by those they have worked with worldwide. The
interviews took place between September and October 2021. Due to extensive global experience
interacting with and shifting conventional industry practices along the supply chain, each study
participant offered substantive reflections from their careers. The participants’ thoughts are
synthesized and quoted throughout the Chapter Four sectional findings. Pseudonyms were
assigned, providing the participants and their organizations anonymity, enabling honest and open
discussions of individual experience. Each participant responded favorably to the interview
requests and the protocol’s line of questioning. After transcription, each participant reviewed
their individual transcripts noting any inconsistencies or needed corrections. Table 1 provides an
overview of the participant's pseudonym, personality trait, leadership title, or role held in which
type of organization, industry sector, and their self-ascribed descriptive word. In addition, Table
1 highlights the self-identified personality traits of introversion or extroversion and the
descriptive term used by the participant to describe their ability to persist when faced with
professional and practice roadblocks.
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Table 1
Participants: Pseudonyms, Personality Traits, Titles/Organization, Sectors, and Descriptive
Words
Pseudonym Personality
trait
Title/organization Sector Descriptive
word
Shauna Introvert Sustainable design
consultant/consultancy
Fashion Truthteller
Phronsie Extrovert CEO/trade association
Fashion/textiles Determined
Betty Extrovert CEO/trade association Fiber/textiles Quietly
determined
Kari Introvert Exec. director/
trade association
Fiber/textiles Determined
Courtney Introvert Chief strategy officer/
fashion technology
Fashion/textiles Competitive
Lauren Introvert Supply chain
consultant/consultancy
Supply chain Determined
Jamie Introvert VP of sustainability/ brand
Fashion Stoic
Chelsea Introvert Research consultant/policy
Supply chain Persistence
Cindy Introvert VP of social
accountability/brand
Supply chain Intuitive
Noelle Introvert CEO/trade association
Supply chain Connector
Andrea Introvert CEO/creative director/
Brand
Fashion Curious
Hanna Introvert VP of sustainability and
product/brand
Fashion Confidence
Whitney Introvert CEO/creative director
/brand
Fashion Determined
Jeannie Extrovert Sustainable design
consultant/consultancy
Supply chain Perseverance
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Findings Research Question 1 Sustainable Fashion's Female Leadership
The fashion sustainability movement is led by women whose career experiences
awakened their understanding of the industry's systemic malpractice. All the women interviewed
for this study witnessed the industry at work and are working to make a difference in the value
chain workplace. Decades of fashion practices have left the planet depleted and the people who
create, develop, and build fashion defeated. The feminized fashion industry serves a population
dominated by male leadership and female workplace servitude and consumerism (Campos
Franco et al., 2019). Awareness of apparel manufacturing impacts became known at the end of
the former century with advocacy driven by global human rights watchdog organizations and
small grassroots groups. Social justice expanded into environmental justice as the sustainability
movement gained traction with smaller brands and suppliers. As sustainability awareness grew,
the women championing responsible apparel development practices emerged as the true leaders
in sustainable fashion. Three subthemes materialized to address the macro theme of Female
Leadership in Research Question 1: Fashion's Business Vortex, Sustainability Awakening,
Authentic Action. Table 2 gives a visual representation of the themes.
Table 2:
Research Question 1 Subthemes: Female Leadership
Themes Explanation Framework alignment
Fashion's business vortex Business as usual Social roles
Sustainability awakening Social and environmental injustices
Social roles: communal,
empathic
Authentic action Self-awareness of right and wrong as
a driver for doing the hard right thing
Beliefs and actionized
behaviors
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Fashion Vortex: Business As Usual
For the women of fashion, the power roles of designer, textile consultant, product
developer are limited. From design studio through the supply chain, the fashion industry is
awakening to the realities of systemic gender bias (Brown et al., 2018). The glass runway barrier
impeded women’s upward mobility in fashion design for decades, keeping them from the top
creative roles that shape the very industry they serve (Brown et al., 2018; Miller, 2016; Stokes,
2015). The data relating to this information has not trickled down to the working ranks where
women are kept in their place as supporting players in an industry thriving from their efforts
(Campos Franco et al., 2019). The participants reiterated the diminished career expectations
impacting financial investment, salary, contract remuneration, hiring, and promotional
opportunities across the interview transcripts. As women shouldered personal career injustices,
they awakened to industry practices affecting the wellbeing of the actors along fashion’s
complex value chain. See Table 3.
Table 3:
Participant Quotes: Men Versus Women
Participant Participant quote
Whitney This is my company, I signed the check that comes to you, if I send you an email, I
expect you to reply to me directly, and not to the production manager, who I
hired and who I also pay.
A man in the same position, who asked for a job to be done in a particular way,
would be a good businessman.
Shauna I was a woman, and it was a “boys club”, BUT that's really ridiculous thinking
because womenswear is dominated by celebrated male designers. No one thinks
twice about Francisco Costa designing womenswear!
I was scared to work for anyone ever again—it just felt too risky.
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Participant Participant quote
Phronsie If you want to be a leader, you have to get to work and leader is such a tough
word, I think, for women.
Chelsea I saw through the research, especially the history of the industry, how the system
has been created to be inequitable. The fashion system is an economic system.
This whole industry is dismissed because it’s a women’s industry, even though,
the people who make the money are the men.
How we see ourselves is how white men have trained us to see ourselves.
I think women should really run the world. I think we are trained to be better
observers of things.
Courtney So, I had an experience which I probably others before. A pretty blatant
experience of misogyny. … I experienced it from a guy who was on the
executive team, and then I later realized like “Oh, this is normal.” [emphasis
added]. So, I’m going to make a decision on who I’m going to work with.
Lauren He may have put up a barrier for me, but I’m just not going to recognize it. I’m
just going to keep doing my thing because this is the right thing to do.
I just thought of these situations as cowardly people doing bad things. I never
really thought of it as gender bias. It didn’t stop me from doing the right thing in
the long-term view.
Jamie Maybe, women’s insecurity is actually encouraged by culture.
Jeannie I didn’t want my contract manager to lose face. They certainly weren’t going to
speak to a young woman when there was an older man in the room.
Historical Business Realities
As the conversations unfolded during the interviews, the participants shared stories where
they experienced discriminatory treatment due to their gender. Instead of refusing to fetch coffee
for a co-speaker before a panel discussion, Kari responded graciously to the request of “Sugar,
would you get me a cup of coffee?” saying, “sure, do you want sugar and cream or just plain?”
When asked to justify her behavior, her description of the man holding a position of established
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power and influence explains her mindfulness in navigating the road ahead. In her words, “yes,
there’s definitely been gender bias here, but was it ever a real factor for me? Not really. I have to
remember what battle I am here to fight.” The expectations that the woman in the room existed
to serve instead of offering intellectual value to the industry discourse reflect literal tenets of
society's gender role expectations exhibited in everyday industry behaviors. Kari’s response to
the coffee request shows how women are trained to serve the social role expectations.
Whether in the factories, the design rooms, the farms, or the banks, women have
encountered demeaning interactions along their career routes. Nine of the 14 participants gave
specific reference to their experiences of inappropriate gendered workplace harassment. The
remaining five participants discussed the gender imbalance in the context of expected role
assignments. When asked about the existence of gendered inequities in fashion's hiring practices,
pay, and promotion, Phronsie’s response was swift, “Of course. Okay. I mean, that was your
standard operating procedure.” The career expectation is hope, and the underpinning
understanding is resignation. But, Phronsie wondered aloud, “doesn't everyone have these
stories?” In an industry built on supporting glamour and tacit creativity, the indignity of young
women remains a commonplace occurrence. The underlying suggestion is not to address the
bullying, not get ruffled by it, stuff it down inside, and move forward.
The design studio is not a safe place. Though over 85% of the people filling the design
assistant, patternmaking, and technical design positions are female, the studios where they work
can be hotbeds of inappropriate aggression, innuendo, harassment, and overture (Campos Franco
et al., 2019; Stokes, 2017). Shauna relayed the emotional outbursts that led to her leaving a job
she loved. After being alerted that a subordinate coworker was placing product orders without
authority, she was called upon to intervene. Once Shauna engaged, the embarrassed coworker
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acted out. He lost his temper, raging as he loomed over her as she sat at her desk. She recalled
the event looking down at her hands, ‘He looked at me, and he said, ‘we’ve been talking, and
we've all decided. Because you’re a woman, you don’t have what it takes.’” The ‘we’ referred to
the three men with whom Shauna worked. Shauna described the interaction as a heartbreak
because she had genuinely loved the company and had built the product from her knowledge,
training, and experience.
When readdressing the experience, Shauna tempered her emotions with added reasoning
for the glass barriers that kept her from holding a position of authority for the brand. Her efforts
for the organization were appreciated yet not attributed to the merit of her training and expertise.
Shauna's words offer her lived example of the industry's systemic gendered social role
expectations:
I get this, and I would have been okay with it. I don't think - I didn't need to be the face
of the brand by any means, and I get why they wouldn't want that. I'm totally fine with
Thad being the creative director and them having their boys club. But I didn't think that
should preclude me from having certain titles or pay, I mean, not if I was running the
show! I can do that. I'm totally fine doing that behind the scenes.
Shauna further related that after studying for a specific design degree and working her
way up, the fact that someone could come in without training or expertise and usurp her job was
devastating. She carries multiple degrees and has a pedigree of working for brands focused on
building responsibly sourced products at a high-quality level. The shock of the actions is
surprising, but the steps themselves are not, as found by discovering both the glass runway and
the glass escalators (Stokes, 2015; Williams,1998). Shauna’s final frustration came through as
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she described how her asking for her rightful titles and pay were dismissed as uptight by the
same coworker.
The dismissal of Shauna’s promotion request as “uptight” illustrates the myth of the
emotional female self-handicapping her career dreams. The suggestion of accepting things as
they are, allows one to continue working as status quo directs, as one of the boys. After
successfully negotiating a large contract with a significant customer, Phronsie recalled a
conversation with a former male boss. “He said to me, ‘you need a hat with a dick on it.’ You
know so that I could have a penis as men do.” She laughed. Did he think this was a compliment?
Phronsie does not need a hat with a penis. Phronsie needs to be acknowledged for being
Phronsie.
Gendered business behavior is not culturally specific. Phronsie recalled a conversation
with a male vendor from Japan. He made it clear that he would never get coffee for the people
sitting at the table. While Phronsie was not requested to provide beverage service, her
expectation of being asked was to perform according to her gender remains high. Early in her
career, Chelsea encountered a request similar to Kari’s of serving coffee to the men in the room.
The Japanese male attitude of servitude regarding appropriate role behaviors aligns with the
American ones. Chelsea recalled a conversation with her mother regarding the gendered slight
she endured. Her mother’s response was born of her own career experience and positionality as a
female doctor. The mother warned her daughter to quiet her desire to rise in protest. Her words
warned there would be more critical battles to wage in the future.
The social role expectations for women in the workplace have seen minor change through
the decades. What has shifted is that women choose to speak up and are being heard. Chelsea is
twenty years younger than Phronsie and a quarter-century younger than Kari. Their common
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intersect is the feminized industry in which they toil. At the same time, their goals of bringing
practice change to the workplace behaviors affecting global planetary and human resources bind
them together. The habitual diminishing of one person by another as girded by individual gender
role assumptions can challenge personal self-awareness and self-efficacy (Trigg, 2006).
Fashion’s persistent gendered behaviors needing change are hiding in plain sight next door and
across the globe.
Hopeful Determination
Fashion classrooms filled with aspiring designers, whose majority are female, hope to
employ their design talents worldwide. Very few graduates are creative geniuses who will build
products at the top luxury market levels. Most fashion graduates work their skills for everyday
wearable items generated for the consuming price-conscious public. The moderate markets of the
world demand growing volumes of apparel items each year, creating volumes of textile waste in
the manufacturing process. As emerging designers learn their trade in the classroom, they also
train to make for scale without understanding their impacts on resources or artisans. When
designers and product developers begin to interact with the supply chain, they are introduced to
the value chain realities. Traditional industry impacts are eye-opening and challenging.
Andrea was first introduced to global supply chain volume practices as an assistant
product developer. As brands build a new item, factories rush to innovate as they increase the
margins of that innovation. Factories often share the new processes, techniques, and applications
with other brands and buyers to recover development costs. Andrea noted being shocked when a
hat from a competitor was offered for integration into her product offering. The factory was
seeking to expand manufacturing units to recoup development costs. The factory was also co-
opting the ingenuity of one designer in over-producing products to achieve affordability. Andrea
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stated, “That globalization started to become clear to me…why are we guessing? And then, at
the end of the season, we are throwing out all this stuff?” Overproducing was an environmental
issue as well as a design problem for Andrea. Andrea noted her dismay with having to reduce
production costs as part of her daily job:
And as I’m doing this, I’m like, I know this is hurting someone’s life right now by
circling this. Like they are going to cut workers’ pay. And make them work harder.
They’re going to do something, and it's always the workers at the end of the line.
Chelsea recalled how artisan skills were accepted if filtered by the western aesthetic lens
but disregarded if presented directly from the hands of the country craftspeople. Whitney voiced
her discomfort with industry behavior after traveling abroad for design inspiration early in her
career, “you know, there just were things I didn’t want to do or didn’t want to live through ever
again.” Witnessing the industry threshing its yield is disturbing, and it can be career-altering.
Noelle firmly believes that the answer is female leadership. “I totally agree the climate
crisis is 100% man-made [emphasis added]. Men caused this problem, and I think women are
going to get us out of it.” Looking at the characteristics assigned to female leadership, Noelle
restated that empathy, compassion, understanding, and collaboration are needed to bring the
industry into climate protection compliance.
Doing the Hard Right Thing: Self-Awareness
The shared reasons for entering the fashion and textile industry are as different as each of
the interviewees. Each of the interviewees migrated into the field of sustainability along
individual paths. Regardless of the individuals’ trajectories, the theme of right and wrong value
chain practices weaves throughout the study research. The women who have chosen to address
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change have risen to leadership roles due to their actions as hope-filled decision-makers and
decision doers.
Right and Wrong
There was no ethical practice handbook for the fashion industry prior to the 1990s. The
garment industry was a relatively ungoverned free for all. Rags to riches stories added glitter to
sweatshop tales, many of which happened in lands far away from where designers first imagined
their creations. When Cindy joined Wanda Lander’s women's brand, factory worker oversight
was reviewed according to vendor compliance. The Manager of Compliance title held little
meaning when applied to the well-being of the workers crafting products in the boroughs of
Manhattan and Brooklyn, let alone in the factories of the far east. Cindy's concern for the title
signaled her intention of caring for the human beings doing the work. She instead took the title of
Manager of Social Accountability. A title created by Cindy and adopted from the SA8000; the
early global code of labor conduct introduced to the industry in 1997 to ensure decent work
everywhere while securing fundamental human rights in socially responsible workplaces
worldwide (Social Accountability International, 2021).
Cindy established a job title for watching over garment workers, and she readily
acknowledges the naivete of posted guidelines exacting practice adherence. Cindy is respected
for her efforts to ensure fair treatment of workers within the industry locally and globally. She
has challenged factory owners on factory cleanliness and workers’ hours, but frets that not
enough change has occurred along the sewing lines to ensure better care for the workers, “I don't
know that things for the workers have changed drastically, or if improved enough, certainly not
enough.”
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Betty reflected on transparency in cotton and chocolate commodity supply chains with
similar concerns. Both commodities are considered consumable treats, available in the western
world at luxury and mass-market price points. So, Betty set out in cotton to do the work that was
deemed to be impossible: to lift the veil on the global cotton supply chain. In sharing her story,
Betty was quick to share credit with others. Her idea of teamwork is raising her team to their best
roles. She might well be behind the scenes enabling success, but Betty is quietly determined to
help her team find their power.
Chelsea was raised to make the world a better place. Her understanding of her upbringing
and its impact on her adult behavior, when faced with doing the right thing, is apparent “I was
aware that doing the right thing is a hard thing to do. While history makes it look easy and
obvious, it's not!” Lauren brings this closer to home with the memory of a family of
entrepreneurs, all working to do what they called ‘the hard, right thing.’ Lauren paused, smiled,
and continued as she spoke of this understanding underpinning her life.
The structures of the textile and apparel value chains support scaled manufacturing
efficiencies. Industry practices hid behind the tiers of suppliers integrated into the complex
supply chain activities from raw material processing through final product construction. Global
manufacturing requires supply chain specialists to help brands and companies concoct their
products each season and year. Jeannie spent her career working directly with suppliers,
developers, and manufacturers. She recalled her time with a top brand known for its commitment
to delivering the best quality products to keep the end-users alive. The brand was considered
small, with annual sales estimated at $100 million. To ensure that the whole organization had a
clear understanding of why they made the materials, supplier, and vendor choices they did, they
had to educate everyone in the company. Jeannie shared how one designer changed her thinking
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after touring the California cotton fields and speaking with the farmers. “At the end of the day,
she just said, ‘I get it, I got it. We will figure it out.’ She (the designer) had this experiential piece
to really internalize what was going on out there.” Experiencing the growing fields allowed
Jeannie to share her textile expertise with the team members making and selling the product line,
thus enabling product development change.
A reflected statement of self-awareness is consistent with the women leading fashion’s
sustainability sector. While each of the participants spoke about revering right actions, they were
not interested in recognition of their efforts. Instead, they acted with authentic intention grown of
personal experience. Being aware of right and wrong is one thing, eventuating right over wrong
is another. The arduous work of sustainability engagement is done by the decision doers.
Female Leadership: The Eco-Action Figure
Fashion sustainability has had a complicated tenure. Once dismissed as a green trend by
the fashion elite, it has struggled to find traction in the broad industry, seen as a high-cost do-
gooder burden that might just go away. However, as environmental activism took hold at the turn
of the 21
st
century, the world became enlightened to the results of industrialization across the
manufacturing world. Sustainability in the fashion and textile sectors includes actions that impact
natural resources, including planetary degradation, resource depletion, human wellbeing, rights,
and social justice. Cultivating awareness is the work of advocates. Empowering action requires
leadership. Sustainability work is women's leadership work.
Raising Awareness: Eco-Ism Over Ego-Ism
No matter how young, one cannot unsee what they have seen with their own eyes. The
real work often begins very early. Kari’s childhood experiences in India and Southeast Asia left
an indelible mark. Her appreciation of cloth came from walking the stalls of the world’s bazaars
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and sewing doll clothes with her grandmother. Kari’s understanding of the imbalance of work
came from the sounds and smells in the heavy air seeping from the sweatshops of Mumbai. Her
childhood dream of building homes for the homeless became the foundational thread of Noelle’s
supply chain impact work. As her awareness of social justice grew, her systems training enabled
her to shift from building environments to reconsidering human engagement with products.
Social justice was the cause winding together her training as an architect and her leadership
transforming the supply chain efforts through the global consumer goods industry. The
childhood experiences left lasting impressions. As Chelsea had mentioned, she was raised to help
make the world a better place. That she chose to make her difference was less about her than
about her service. The participants each described her work as a tool for helping others achieve
their dreams. To paraphrase Kari’s thoughts about the women of fashion sustainability and their
efforts, it is about the ecosystem, and it is not about an ego-system. It is about building a
community to do the right thing. Shauna's thoughts summed up the female leadership
phenomenon; “Well, it is all women. I mean, it’s a women's movement.”
There Is No Choice: Saving the Farm
Saving the farm comes at a high price. Often, the diploma and the dreams are set aside to
tend to the demands of the earth. Within the study cohort, ah-ha realizations were shared but
rarely as hard pivot points but as an awakening to intention. While Kari repeated her
grandfather's philosophy of “insecticide, pesticide, fungicide, this aside, it's suicide.” Her
recollection was not of the rhyme but of agricultural pressure to irradicate pests, continuing to
“deal with death” [emphasis added]. The choice for organic on the farm level was made to save
her family farm and other family farms, and by choosing to do so, Kari’s goal was to change the
structure of American agriculture. She had work to do, but when asked if she did so in the
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leadership role, she scoffed, “I never considered myself a leader quote-unquote. I was just doing
what needs to be done.”
Implementation of supply chain transparency, worker safety, and wellbeing measures are
the domain of service leadership. Ensuring that no harm comes from making a frock can
challenge the most seasoned practitioner. Courtney was extremely clear as she described why she
chose to work in the sustainability sector:
To be good and purposeful, the intersectionality of fashion with good and sustainability,
to be good and purposeful, … for me, sustainability meant purpose-driven work. I knew
that would be my path because I was trying to bring those two things together. I was so
passionate about fashion and purpose.
The passion blended into the intention of raising practice behaviors is the choice made by
the women leading fashion sustainability today. Elevating process activities might be complex,
but sustainability experts do not question the right choice. Courtney restates, “when I realized
there was a choice, I wasn’t going to choose the other way, right? Why would I do that?” Andrea
further expanded upon her thinking when recalling her adamant stance in a partner debate:
Are we going to look back at this in 10 years and say did we do the right thing here? And
my answer for that, in this case, is: It’s a no [emphasis added]! We need to cut this fabric;
we need to make sure we’re not making more of it.
Numerous comments made during the interviews highlight the moments the participants
pinpoint as their sustainability epiphanies. Table 4 offers additional participant statements shared
during the interviews.
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Table 4:
Participant Quotes: The Ah-Ha Moments
Participant Participant quote
Jamie I had a good understanding of organic in food. I knew what that represented. I
really had an “oh, shit” moment that night in the hotel room. “CRAP! What
have I been doing?” [emphasis added]. I decided that night that I could either
leave the industry or make changes in the way I could.
I wanted to evolve the industry.
Hanna She sat on my couch, and she looked at me and she started crying and said, “we
can no longer operate how we’ve been operating.” She said, “I’m not coming
here to try to stress you out.”
She said to me, “we either have to figure out how to change or I don’t want to do
this business anymore.”
Jeannie I’ve been in the factories where the smell of a good or a bad factory, well, you
can’t wait to get out of there. And we’re privileged to be able to walk out of
there. The people working there—they don’t have that privilege.
Cindy The sense of people not having any say in their work conditions, not getting
enough money, working in very inhumane physical conditions—dirty, cramped,
squalid. Like nothing I’ve ever observed.
Phronsie Sustainability grew together both personally and professionally. It wasn’t one
particular thing; it was the idea we should be doing good.
Discussion Research Question 1
Women are the sustainability movement leaders in today’s fashion and textile industry.
How they came to join the movement is personal. Their continued engagement is an amalgam of
their beliefs, their experiential understanding of right actions and wrong behaviors. They acted
with knowledge gained through personal involvement and intention. In 10 of the 14 discussions,
the study participants stated they must continue this work to make the hard choices and challenge
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the norms. Not for fame, glory, or even acknowledgment, but working against industry norms
rewarded with accolades, awards, and prestige. Instead, these leaders endeavored to do the hard
right thing because it had to be done.
Findings Research Question 2: Factors for Navigating Change
Witnessing the social justice and environmental incursion throughout apparel
manufacturing’s supply chain, these leaders have pushed past the industry's biases and barriers
by collaborating with other women to construct methods, processes, and practice boundaries that
support responsible industry behaviors. How women saw themselves aligned with their purposes
led them to establish process change. Whether their perception of themselves was socially or
culturally positioned or nurtured by their positionality, how these individuals navigated their way
into the leadership arena, sharing their career stories offers a unique perspective of female
determination. The study data reveals two subthemes addressing Research Question 2’s Factors
for Navigating Change: Navigating while Female and Personality Trait Ownership. Table 5
shares the subthemes of Research Question 2.
Table 5:
Research Question 2 Subthemes: Factors for Navigating Change
Themes Explanation Framework alignment
Navigating while female Gender role biases, choices,
precautions, and self-awareness
Social roles and evolved
differences
Personality trait
ownership
Owning leadership personality
traits. Introverts versus
extroverts. The choice of power.
Social roles, beliefs, and
actionable behaviors
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Navigating While Female
Women have always adapted to their environments. The global workforce is over 50%
female, yet the workplace is not an equal milieu for all personnel. For women to fit into their
organizations, they often modify their behaviors and adjust their goals to keep their jobs. Hopes
and dreams fuel career goals, while integrity and self-awareness can steer a career’s crusade.
Stories of women pressured to compromise their ideals for a fantasy belonging to someone in a
position of power are not foreign to the feminized industry. The challenges faced by the
fashion’s sustainability leadership are complex, requiring focus and clarity. The challenges faced
by the women sustainability leaders require lucidity and purposeful determination to create
durable procedural change.
Protecting Eyes Wide Open
To navigate the fashion industry’s hiring obstacles and hold on to their jobs, the study
participants spoke of the techniques they used to maneuver around the barriers of gender bias.
Knowing where one’s voice can be heard and where one's impact can be felt was a well-repeated
mantra. Rather than choosing to battle, the women of sustainable fashion have chosen to align
instead of fight for change. Remaking the industry is for the betterment of all, not at the
detriment of one gender over another. To transform an industry, normative practices along the
value chain need to be accessed for appropriateness over efficiency or profitability. Each
participant spoke of their work on behalf of their organizations, brands, and corporations to
correct sustainability's thorniest issues. Their concerns aligned regarding the global fashion
economic systems mired by historic gender inequities. The forward path for an industry-wide
systemic overhaul remains elusive, considering that eight of the participants recalled personal
incidences of gender mistreatment. Some incidences were #METOO tales of sexual harassment
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or predatory behaviors, and other lived experiences revealed inappropriate overture and
aggression incidents. Regardless, the women have each constructed their own weapons for
survival.
Dream jobs can turn into nightmares. Phronsie uses her voice, a self-proclaimed big
mouth; she is no shrinking violet. When inappropriately propositioned by a male boss in an
elevator, her sharp tongue supported by self-awareness pushed him back on his heels. Jeannie
immediately reported on a vendor, putting future workflow with the supplier on notice. In
numerous cases, standing up for oneself has led to the women being silenced, sidelined, and left
out in the cold. Pushed to the edge, Shauna stood up for herself and the company with her
coworker but was fired. The company failed within a year. Andrea was adamant regarding
quality and value in an argument with her male co-founder, who used the excuse of profitability
in an attempt to overrule product development’s materials choices. Lauren worked miracles with
suppliers and vendors, ensuring her boss was perceived as a rock star only to be betrayed by his
ego when he became threatened by her leadership capabilities. She was commended for a job
well done. “I had no desire to take his job—I just wanted to do good meaningful work and to
have an impact.” Noelle found her knowledge and expertise dismissed on job sites due to her
gender and race. Often women must confront their offenders for transgression in the workplace
where the offender's allies outnumber the woman. Courtney’s industry expertise outweighed her
colleagues, yet she was talked over during presentations, rebuffed in meetings, and found her
research efforts co-opted by her male peers. Betty stated when faced with the men in the supply
chain pushing against her wishes; she determinately navigated a different path for the required
results. No was not an answer she was willing to accept regardless of who was saying it.
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Girls Clubs: Collaboration, Teamwork, and Support Systems
All participants acknowledged that gender was a factor leading to the treatment they
endured and or witnessed in hiring, financing, and work allocation. A third of the participants
wondered if a feminine spirit or personality type was driving the sustainability support systems.
According to Kari, men are still controlling the brands’ power of resource appropriation,
manufacturing, sourcing, and finance. Women are leading the empathy-driven NGO sectors,
building bridges and ecosystems, which are in turn enabling more female business development.
Jamie stated that the traditional fashion industry was to keep proprietary information secret, not
to share, thus discouraging transparency across industry practices. Opacity is the antithesis of the
sustainability movement. Sustainability’s female leaders are meeting and collaborating to
strengthen the processes to benefit more brands. They are also determined to change old business
practices. Shauna commented, “I have the most hope for entrepreneurs who want to do it right, to
build business models that work for them and for their customers.” Courtney is emphatic when
she says, “if we were to really successfully move through sustainability or environmentally
driven work, we need people to be empowered because this is all hands-on deck, now!” Chelsea
feels she was trained for the challenge of making the world a better place. The 2030 United
Nations’ better world agenda accelerated the urgency for change. Those who are putting forward
the change efforts are well aware that it is harder to do the right thing than the old guard
protecting the status quo ever imagined. Table 6 highlights additional participant quotes as they
relate to sustainability collaboration, partnerships, and teamwork in the field.
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Table 6:
Participant Quotes: Collaboration, Partnerships, and Teamwork
Participant Participant quotes
Kari You can have the vision, but if you're not willing to put the homework, into
building the bridges, building those partnerships, building the relationships, and
I feel like that is where I believe women have really made the difference.
You’ve seen they're willing to take the time to invest in building the
partnerships.
It's not an ego system, it's an ecosystem. And I feel like women are more uniquely
suited because we, we are the heart of the home.
Phronsie Circularity is an area we are going to see women do better because this is an area
that women play well in. Men are not the world’s best collaborators – they want
to lead the charge. … Circularity is these people working together to make it
happen.
Courtney If you look at what has not been working for women in the workplace is there is
actually a lack of humility. … This is not ego driven work. … We need people
to be empowered because this is all hands-on-deck.
Lauren I think what it means is like instead of just thinking about the immediate of like
delivery the product, the cost and making.
Much more transactional decisions thinking of these business decisions much
more relational and bringing this concept of a longer term mutually beneficial
partnership and relationship, if this brand grows with this factory than this
factories business grows as well.
If we’re negotiating for win-win, then we win, they win, and we grow together.
There does not have to be a winner and a loser in business deals.
Hanna We wanted to educate our partners and kind of take them on this journey with us
and that could be challenging when you're in a country where women are not in
a place of power and you're coming into the place trying to explain to them why
you want things to be done differently.
My community of individuals within sustainability is mostly women.
Hanna We are very much a collective where we are trying to further each other,
committed to the greater good of sustainability so there's a lot of that
collaboration and support.
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Participant Participant quotes
Jamie I was part of multiple groups of women and sustainability— we were each other’s
support, a support network, I would even say champions. We were there to
literally support one another because we didn’t have the support in the industry.
Persistence Instead of Popularity
While the fashion industry has creative gender barriers emergent from social role
expectations, the outerwear industry’s roadblocks based on gendered expectations of physical
prowess lead to workplace assignments. Andrea discussed that the first two companies she
worked at out of school had “clear dividing lines.” The perceived more challenging sports
requiring more technical product engineering and development had men in product development
and design. In contrast, more feminine activities, such as yoga, were supported by female
employees. Nevertheless, the brands both fell into the outerwear market sector, generating
wearable gear for men and women in numerous sports.
Both Cindy and Hanna work on the high end of American fashion, with brands
committed to sustainability practices and founded by women. They have each worked with the
brand founders for over a decade. Both women noted that they had a majority of female
managers, administrators, and employees working at all levels within their organizations. Cindy
also indicated that her organization received fewer male applications when there was an
advertised position. She wondered if a woman’s brand with female ownership caused fewer men
to apply for positions at the company. It is a reasonable question for that particular brand.
However, when reviewing the top fashion houses, it remains true that the creative directors and
the top leadership fashion roles are all filled by men (Brown et al., 2018; Stokes, 2015).
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Andrea voiced her questions aloud, “Who are expected to be experts? By what criteria?
Why are men elevated to the role of expert? How was the determination made?” Andrea stated
what she felt was obvious: gender was something extra, beyond schooling or training, leading to
career path assignation. That women’s success rates are not helped when their deck is stacked
against them.
It is just a dress! According to Chelsea, raising awareness of institutional improprieties is
not helped when the whole industry is perceived as “just” a women's industry. While men direct
fashion's power and money, women still bear the weight of making the goods that fill the racks
in the world's retail malls. Chelsea’s investigative work of the industry's environmental impacts
led her to conclude that because fashion is a feminized industry, regardless of its grandeur, it is
not given the credence as the male-gendered industries of automobile, construction, engineering,
or technology.
Personality Trait Drivers
Personality traits nurtured along personal evolutions can pigeonhole behaviors and
establish expectations assigned to people (Cain, 2012). Shy, timid, bashful are pejorative titles
pinned to introverts on playgrounds, classrooms, and the workplace, while the powerful mantles
anointing extroverts are genius, bold, and charismatic. Introverts and extroverts alike have made
their way to leadership roles across industries, including creative industries. Eleven of the 14
interviews identified themselves as introverts. In the findings of this study, the question of
personality type came up repeatedly in the conversation. The women of the study spoke with
honesty of how they saw themselves in their various workplace environments.
The women’s self-awareness of their personality traits guided their practice impressions
as leaders. Each of the study conversations unfolded how personal intentions and values were
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additional drivers for the participants, regardless of their introversion or extroversion. If
introverts watch and learn from their actions and mistakes, then it stands to reason that those who
will figure out the needed change actions will be those who watch, learn, and choose responsible
corrective measures. The idea of the intentional leader being a change activist fits well with the
fashion sustainability leader. Sustainable fashion leaders have watched the misdeeds and have
been the recipients of abusive actions in many cases. Their first-hand knowledge propelled them
to decisively maneuver past conventional industry obstacles to imagine the new sustainability
methodologies, platforms, and technologies that are successfully being adopted by responsible
market sectors. The women leading sustainable industry change reflect on their experience,
question industry traditions, and pull from their values toolkits themselves to navigate fashion
forward.
The Intentional Introverts of Sustainability
Fashion’s sustainability introverts have discovered their superpowers by focusing on
generating ‘no harm’ due to the actions of their work. As sustainability practice has numerous
nuanced avenues, the leaders who have shared their career stories in this study are determined to
protect the people and planetary resources involved in building clothing consumables. The words
of author Susan Cain address their workplace actions: “figure out what you are to contribute to
the world and make sure you do it” (2012, p. 266). As Courtney confirms, “once you have seen
the impacts on the supply chain workers, you cannot choose to do anything else.” The study’s
introverts have navigated the professional requirements of public speaking, financial and
contractual negotiations, partnership conflicts with studied heroism. While their natural
tendencies are to retreat in order to think and construct strategies for advancing ideals, they have
adapted and delivered the goods as powerfully as an extrovert might. Noelle feels that her
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introversion is a gift to be shared, to encourage and ensure that others’ good thoughts will be
heard. Cindy has used her introversion to strengthen her one-on-one relationships so that when
she speaks, the room full of allies turns to listen. Whitney is an introvert’s introvert. She is also a
dyed-in-the-wool pseudo-extrovert who can deliver an inspiring speech to a packed audience
when called upon to inspire. When the harrowing work stories need telling, when the laborers
need advocacy, when the planet needs champions, these introverts prove they are vocal and
empowered sustainability activists. For fashion sustainability introvert leaders, doing the hard
right thing takes intention, persistence, and play-acting as an extrovert for the betterment of the
world.
The Persistent Extroverts of Sustainability
As in all industry sectors, women are working in the trenches with brands, mills, and
organizations at all levels to integrate sustainability thinking into daily workflows. While
sustainability has been seen as the milieu of women, few women have found their way into
sustainability’s top roles. Extroverts made up less than a quarter of the study’s participants. As
extroverts are bold, charismatic, and assertive, the extroverts of this study also displayed patient
persistence, traits often assigned to introverts. One of the extroverts qualified herself as a quiet
extrovert, suggesting that she holds her extroversion in check. The connection of persistence and
patience to extrovert leaders might well conflict with the perception of America’s leadership
extrovert ideal yet is one of the styles of leadership that the sustainable fashion industry
desperately needs. Each of the study’s extroverts made their marks by persisting in delivering
new strategic thinking to save the entrenched industry.
Phronsie identifies as an assertive extrovert. Phronsie’s career in the textile world spans
three decades, working for brands, textiles mills, and as an international consultant. Her peers
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note her hard work and keen intelligence in the field. She has made sure her voice is evident at
every table she joins. According to Phronsie’s recollections, many more men filled the decision-
making seats. She kept a tally at each meeting, making notes in her notebook of the number of
men versus women participating in the conversations. A quarter of the population at the meetings
were women filling positions of impact. Phronsie’s mused, “We got a job and managed to hang
on to it. You know they had to have one woman or something like that.” Betty identifies as an
extrovert with a small “e,” who migrated into the textile world through the communications
industry. Her work for social justice in global commodities has afforded her an understanding of
gender demeanor at work. Betty reflected on women’s behavior in the workforce, noting that
men often brag themselves into roles, while women rarely reach higher than their confidence
allows. Betty identified that women bring questioning to their roles and positions in contrast to
men’s braggadocio. The women’s questioning could be the introvert behavioral traits of watchful
consideration. Added to the recollections of the extroverts in the study, each participant spoke of
their leadership practices being researched, mindful, and intentionally deliberated. Their
leadership intentionality determines increased outcome impact.
Jeannie is a founding leader in the sustainable apparel sector. Her peers laud Jeannie’s
efforts in the arena. Jeannie’s impact began by raising environmental awareness with the
exposure of organic cotton growing and evolved from there. The commitments made by the
brands and their vendors took grit. At the beginning of sustainability’s environmental movement,
the efforts were grown with honest intention and lots of conviction. Relationships between
brands and vendors nurtured healthy soil and fair-trade initiatives above the bottom-line
concerns. A natural extrovert who might acknowledge her focused work for the planet from
within the industry, Jeannie is not one to bang on her drum for attention. She has learned to
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temper her extroversion blending her passion and knowledge for the best outcome. She has
unabashedly directed many people in their sustainability awakenings during her career. By
bringing people to witness the actual growers and farmers in their fields or to the factories to
experience how the actual doers and makers of the materials and final products toil, they could
internalize a holistic value chain. Once the fields and factories have been heard, touched, and
seen, their reality is unforgettable. It has taken focused effort from determined people. Jeannie
shakes her head, chuckling in astonishment, “I mean sustainability is the darling right now,
which we’ve all worked a long time and hard for.”
Negative, Nancy: Silencing the Imposter, the Queen Bees, and the Faux Allies
No woman forges forward without running into a barrier of some kind, regardless of
being shy or bold. Danger could be hiding at each turn along with a career, turning a garden path
into a twisted struggle. Two of the three extroverts spoke of dealing with the disappointment of
women thwarting the growth of other women. Queen bees intentionally hold their positions of
power while suppressing other women’s ascension. Betty reflected:
I’ve also seen a couple of times that women in emerging economies that are very male-
dominated environments tend to take on quite aggressive male characteristics. So
somehow, the women, I think, to survive, they become quite aggressive.
Phronsie’s disappointment mixes with her hope that queen bees are a throwback of
generational behavior. In an arena with few leadership roles held by women, there simply was
not enough room for more women at the top. She commented, “the queen bees, it just that,
they’re going to step on everybody, I mean, it’s so disappointing.” While women have to be on
guard vigilant for potentially inappropriate behaviors of male colleagues, they must also be wary
of their female colleagues tripping them up along their career journey.
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The imposter syndrome tortures many as they work their way forward on their odysseys.
As sustainability work has emerged, there have been struggles to define the words and the
standards serving as methodology guideposts. Concerns of pollution, sweatshops, modern
slavery, and greenwashing claims have held brands from announcing their actions, concerned
that they are not doing enough or enough right on their sustainability journey. While women
have sought out mentors for expertise and advice, they have also discussed their insecurity over
doing the right thing well. Five of the participants spoke of imposter syndrome. Jamie comments
that her imposter syndrome ties her personal perception of her efforts and impacts. As the
practices can incorporate everything from recycled fibers, zero-waste pattern cutting, production
waste, water pollution, and social justice, the concern for doing right can derail confidence.
Jamie has discussed this with her sustainability sorority. Hanna’s fears at the beginning of her
brand’s sustainability practice were of not doing it right or doing sustainability with enough
intention that somehow their brand efforts were adding to the greenwashing industry lore. Jamie
and Hanna could bolster each other’s confidence in battling their imposter concerns. Jamie
recalls a conversation with Hanna regarding their mutual struggles with the sustainability
imposter syndrome; Hanna commented, “‘Yeah, you have imposter syndrome, so do I,’ and I
was like, how can you have it you’re doing all this phenomenal work? That doesn’t make any
sense! Hanna’s response was, ‘we all have it.’” Both Jamie and Hanna are well respected for
their efforts in the movement. However, both feel there is much more to be accomplished. Their
humility is another example of how they continue to push change efforts forward.
Faux Allegiance
The fashion industry is perceived as a welcoming industry for most people, regardless of
gender and sexual identity. While everyone can work in the various product sectors, applying
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their talents and skills in the pursuit of beautiful wearable items, the measurement of everyone’s
potential is held against an elusive tape stapled to the industry’s glass runway. This study does
not distinguish sexual preference as a category to pursue in the discussions of sustainability. The
topic emerged in three conversations where the participants felt their power subjugated by gay
men trying to control their fragile power structures.
Gay men in the sector often claim an understanding of female fashion plight because of
their sexual preferences. Gay men behave though they understand the frustrations of women
while they step boldly onto the glass runway or into the spotlight. They are taking power from a
subjugated group and lauding control over a proclaimed ally but a perceived competitor.
Courtney shakes her head at the memory of a coworker’s proclaimed understanding of female
workplace injustices due to his homosexuality. Yet as explained by Allyson Stokes’ (2019)
definition of fashion’s glass runway, gay men receive preferential treatment in the fashion
industry. Courtney’s awareness of the industry’s acceptance of misogyny, regardless of sexual
preference, molded her future career decisions. The coworker invalidated his allegiance
statement when he wrested Courtney’s authority by announcing a massive decision for her sector
without including or acknowledging her efforts. Shauna’s dealings with misogyny had her
considering leaving the industry altogether.
Jamie recalled though being hired as a lead designer, she found herself tutoring a highly
creative group of young male designers with no industry experience. The brand’s creative
director was a gay man who encouraged the young men to push the creative boundaries yet
tasked her, the one with the industry knowledge and experience, to tame their artistry into
producible clothes. The expectation fashioned an untenable power imbalance, with Jamie in the
design studio’s gatekeeper role rather than the design ringleader. In both situations, the male
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authorities controlled the spotlight casting a shadow on the efforts of the females. Jamie queried
a gay colleague as to this behavior. She shared her discovery of the gendered preferential
treatment having more to do with insecurity than with competition, and perhaps gay men were
better trained to hide their discomfort. Jamie then wondered, “maybe women’s insecurity is
actually encouraged by culture. … Maybe they’re running around feeling like imposters as well,
but they certainly can’t say that they’re imposters whereas women can own their insecurity.” As
women step forward into sustainability leadership roles, there will be competition and
collaboration from all corners. Kari offered her advice, “In stepping up, and doing what you need
to do, and if you’re leading that change, you need to put on your bulletproof vest, because if
you’re in the front lines, you’re going to get shot at!”
Discussion Research Question 2
The rules of industry engagement were not created equally. Societal expectations woven
throughout decades-old workplace routines and in accepted male-dominant behaviors veil the
understanding of normal, inclusive behavior. Nevertheless, women, be they introverts,
extroverts, or pseudo-extroverts, trained themselves to adapt to their workplace environments in
order to get their work done. Each participant developed tactics, traits, techniques, and skills and
honed them as they navigated fashion’s bramble-filled career labyrinth. They have learned to
reach out and ask for direction along the way. The personalized tools of perseverance,
determination, stoicism, and confidence are the beliefs of personal capabilities that help to power
their efforts of doing the hard right things. Their awareness of their ability and capabilities
outgrew society’s role constraints, as has their business prowess strengthened.
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Findings Research Question 3: Engaged Role Modeling for Sustainable Fashion
Moving the industry forward requires intentional engagement at all organizational levels.
Sustainable fashion is about collaboration, teamwork, and systems retooling. Rerouting an
industry requires heavy lifting, including paving the way, generating wayfinding signage,
navigational tools, and asking for directions when lost. Women have learned by watching.
Women working behind the scenes and on center stage have made the movement what it is
today. They have formed alliances, created exchanges for knowledge, supply chain
vendors/processes/methods, formed organizations, consultancies, and brands dedicated to
innovative product development. They have attacked the thorny issues from all angles and have
raised awareness for the industry’s next steps. Role models set the stage for life by miming
behavioral expectations in the home, schoolroom, and in the global workforce. Society has
shaped the roles that women choose. As women become leaders, they adapt to the new
leadership challenges but remain themselves shaping their roles as they grow. These are the
people who are mentoring fashion future leaders. Their next task is recruiting and training their
replacements for a genuinely sustainable and valuable chain of succession. The female leaders of
the sustainability movement are the role models for the women setting their sights on fashion’s
future. Three subthemes addressing the macro theme of Engaged Role Modeling: Self-Reflective
Explanations, Purpose and Choice, Kind Action Heroes, surfaced from the data that address the
study’s third Research Question. The subthemes for this Research Question are spelled out in be
in Table 7.
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Table 7:
Research Question 3 Subthemes: Engaged Role Modeling
Themes Explanation of theme Framework alignment
Self-reflective explanations Stated understanding of
motivation
Social roles lead to beliefs
and actionized behaviors
Purpose and choice Values based decision-
making
Beliefs and actionized
behaviors
Kind action heroes Authentic empathetic choices Beliefs and actionized
behaviors
Self-Reflective Expectations: I See Me
The sustainability movement is a tangle of many threads, social justice, environmental
degradation, resource depletion, waste generation, that when combined point to a perilous future
caused by a neglectful past. The study participants are aware that their work requires higher level
of motivation and engagement. These 14 women are determined, persistent, stoic, confident,
competitive about making a difference for future generations. Twelve of the women are in or
have been in long term relationships, 11 are mothers, one is a grandmother, all care deeply about
the fashion industry's future global imprint. They have reflected on how to continue doing the
work they are passionate about and were trained to succeed in while retooling entrenched
manufacturing organizational systems. Sustainability implementation is complex and
challenging. The pandemic has further complicated planning for the future sustainability next
steps. Reflecting on the climate crisis, the recent global health crisis, and the call for
collaboration came through loud and clear.
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Noelle is thoughtful, introverted, and engaging. She shared her story, telling of her tears
shed during of the pandemic, of being a new leader, and a single mother attempting to balance
the organizational chaos and online learning without a pandemic cliff notes guide. The burden of
the year colored her words yet her hope for leading change shined through. Noelle leaned
forward and spoke in a quick powerful burst:
I've been thinking about this a lot, and so you know, I was reading all these articles so
basically what it says is you know about the climate crisis is man-made, right? It is just
that sentence, you know. The climate crisis is man-made [emphasis added]. It was really
funny because, when the IPCC report came out, those words just kept resonating in my
head and I was trying to figure out why, right? I was like; well, the climate crisis is man-
made…it means that men have caused this problem in the leadership roles that have
gotten us to this point. And so, the second part of it is: A sustainable future is woman-
made [emphasis added].
Sustainability’s Supportive Sisterhood
The path ahead can be successfully traversed when the course is understood for the
journey’s shared lessons. The interview conversations reflect the current thinking of each of the
participants concerning the urgency and needs moving forward. Lifting sustainability’s reach
requires the efforts of many, not sole designers in ivory towers or number-crunching merchants
looking a year ahead at holiday orders while plotting stocking-keeping units to secure factory
space. Instead, the conversations of sustainability’s female leadership need acceptance and
amplification across the broader population.
Sustainability practitioners have shared knowledge, support, vendors, tips, and expertise
with one another to support global adoption in the field. Fourteen sustainability veterans were
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interviewed for this study, not one of them considered for the knowledge she possessed to be
hers to own instead. Each of the women was intent on helping the next person on the
sustainability path. Each participant quickly acknowledged the cadre’s efforts and guidance,
giving credit where credit was due. There is a sustainability alliance that shares information with
the care of handing down a favorite sweater. Hanna speaks with genuine esteem for those who
advised her and offered encouragement as she navigated her organization forward on its
sustainability journey. Hanna commented that she had never felt so welcomed in all her years in
the industry as when she joined sustainability’s sisterhood. Noelle’s thoughts of inclusion are
added to Hanna’s. Noelle states that collaboration and teamwork in partnerships are needed to
survive and ultimately thrive. Noelle expanded her thoughts by sharing, “I think those are female
characteristics, and so I totally agree the climate crisis is 100% man-made. Men caused this
problem, and I think, women are going to get us out of it.” Chelsea’s thoughts for her future
impact bring home the need for paying attention to those who have blazed the trails and shaped
enlightened followers to new practice thinking. She wished aloud, “I hope to be a good example
and just show the people that work with me, to empower them, to see the voice that they have
and encourage that voice, to lean into that voice.” Women leaders lean into their authentic
intentions while modeling for the emergent future fashion leaders.
Purpose and Unintentional Choices
The theme of purpose and intention is a line in the sand decision. The individual choice
of the line of right or wrong, between organic or conventional, virgin or recycled, local or global
manufacturing is not simply a choice of one or the other. Each fashion supply chain decision has
impacts that unravel more consequences along with the complex manufacturing tapestry. The
choices continue mounting, the implications growing with each season of production. As leaders,
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the participants were clear in knowing that the choices they make are not options but the
decisions of purposeful action.
Persistence to Get 'Er Done
“There’s nothing in the world that matters more than persistence and enthusiasm,”
Chelsea emphatically stated. Chelsea’s self-reflective statement reveals more of her nature than
wishes and dreams. It shows the intention and purpose infusing her choices and, therefore, her
actions. Courtney is the chief strategy officer of a fashion and tech startup. She was intentional in
choosing her untraditional title. Her goal was a title reflecting the importance of the work the
organization was seeking to do. Her wish for her role was to use her gifts of strategy and
implementation to create the most significant benefit beyond the organization. By choosing a
title more expansive than chief sustainability officer (CSO), Courtney was able to grow the
thinking for the position but also for female leadership in the role. Her choice was a deliberate
signal of commitment to the future.
Kari feels that she does not have a choice. She is “just getting things done—what needs
to be done.” As a leader, she does not see that she has a choice other than getting things done and
getting them done right now. The statement “Just get ‘er done!” was shared verbatim by one-
third of the study respondents as they reflected on their intentions to follow through when the
work was hard. Whitney relayed her feelings of responsibility and persistence to “just do
whatever you had to do” and make it happen. Her reflections conveyed the reality for women
founders, “it just was very different from anything else I’ve ever done before in some ways, and
just like everything I’ve ever done before in other ways.” There is no choice but to figure out
how to work, then do the work, and finally complete the work before starting fresh with the next
set of tasks. Her community and her commitment to her community and her brand have not been
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a choice. When her business struggled and fashion businesses always struggle, Whitney
persevered. The conversations support the words the women used when reflecting on their
options and their decisions. Kari chuckled knowingly, “choice is of your battles too, then take
your bag of skills and go to a higher authority—your own!” Each participant’s determination and
persistence served in support of their higher purpose; their passions served by their beliefs.
Perception of Hiring, Titles, and Gender
Studies have spotlighted male prominence in fashion’s design studios and c-suite (Brown
et al., 2018; Stokes, 2015, 2017). Hiring inequities are pervasive throughout the industry. While
a disproportionately female population seeks fashion education and training, the business
education leading to the c-suites was obtained by men. This male dominance led to an
imbalanced executive pipeline. Fashion’s imbalance is not a gender headcount with a simple
tally but an imbalance in role assignment, promotion, pay, and availability. Within fashion
brands, gender bias can become convoluted. While each of the study participants had personal
stories to share of witnessed inequities, the asymmetry discussed was about the difficulty of
hiring for particular roles where qualified female applicants were hard to find. Persistence came
up in numerous conversations regarding choices of hiring and titles.
Shauna’s gender hindered her from obtaining rightful promotion and appropriate titles in
an industry that contradicts its own actions by easily hiring men to design womenswear. The
CFDA has a who is who roster crowded with male designers known for creating women’s
clothes, yet of their current 480-person roster, less than 10% of the brands are menswear, with
100% of those menswear brands designed by men (CFDA, 2021). That does not mean that
women do not design menswear. However, it does mean that they do not receive recognition for
it. Jamie wondered aloud if her gender was why she was hired as a womenswear designer when
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she trained in tailoring and menswear. The concern of hiring fairness was a topic of the
participants working with female founder-led brands. Cindy questioned the application inquiries
received for a variety of management positions. The applicants were predominately female in the
jobs posted outside of warehouse distribution. Was it that men simply did not want to work for a
womenswear brand led and founded by a woman?
Hanna’s organization had different hiring concerns. It took the company over a year to
find a female CEO with the experience and small brand understanding that could help bring the
brand to the next level. They had received numerous resumes from men with the right schooling
leadership expertise but little to no knowledge of sustainable luxury women’s products. The
combination of requirements undoubtedly complicated the search but should not have ruled out a
gender. Was this an example of the glass ceiling keeping women down?
Whitney has run her business as the creative director and CEO for two decades. She has
made tough decisions regarding financing, sourcing, and distribution. When she expressed
concern regarding her cost of goods sold and her accounting structures, her business advisors
suggested she “not worry her pretty little head” about her financial reports. Her beauty has zero
to do with her business acumen. A man in the same position worrying over his accounts would
be complimented for being a good businessman. Whitney says the list of such interactions goes
on and on. The impact is demeaning and can damage confidence beyond bookkeeping. But, as a
woman founder, what choice does one have for not continuing forward?
The women participants are experts in the field, each highly trained with the necessary
knowledge to perform at the highest levels for their roles. They have expanded their reach as
they gained knowledge and broadened practice skills. Courtney is calm yet passionate about the
work she does. She is the one who courageously asks the tough questions in the meetings only to
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be castigated by the men at the table having less expertise but higher authority. Courtney has
trained herself to wait for the room to awaken to the implications of absent information. The
women of this study have waited, survived, and persisted because they feel they have no other
choice if they want to change the industry.
Chelsea found her way into fashion through a side door she titled “empathy for artisans,”
shaped by her concern about exploitation in global markets. Educated as a lawyer, Chelsea was
determined to make a positive impact. She speaks of being driven by the quest of preventing
“bad things from happening” to others. Her kind heart ached in witnessing the global effects
coursing across the system. Chelsea spoke of her ah-ha moment, “when I visited those markets
and would like go and trackback where those things came from that I just started to understand
like how things came to be created.” Chelsea desires to make a significant dent. Her choices and
her beliefs were crafted by her positionality and have kept her focused on the long game to help
others. She sees this as her no choice, choice. She is not alone. Shauna spoke of the sadness she
felt that pushed her to consider leaving the industry altogether. Instead, Shauna brought together
her knowledge, expertise, and torment to open a consulting practice to help others gain
understanding while protecting vendors in the process. The desire to protect in the service of the
industry is an imperative, not an option. There is no choice.
Women's Leadership: The Values Based Action Figure
Female leaders are depicted as empathic, transformation, and communal doyens.
Sustainability’s female leaders are determined to enforce social justice and environmental
stewardship while enabling fashion to continue developing wearable products globally. They are
focused on doing so kindly and collaboratively. They are reimaging purposeful product
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development, growth and optimal business size, profitability, and intentional business
governance.
A Kindness Cape
Leadership should be a holistic pursuit. The concept of profit and loss as the single scale
for weighing leadership success is weakening as the triple bottom line gains traction in
manufacturing practices and industry lexicons. As the climate crisis challenges have moved to
the front pages, the concept of purpose-driven business has established itself with sustainability
leaders. Authentic leadership founded on bottom-line structures can also be grounded by values-
based behaviors. The participants spoke of their intentions related to their values and how their
gender supported the care and keeping of the feminized fashion industry.
Noelle is serious about her intentions for the success of the organization. Her goal is to
build future leaders for the world. Her belief of enabling enthusiastic and engaged team members
who are their best selves is what is needed to the right the industry’s past wrongs. Courtney
focuses her strategy on helping active and present employees to make her wish possible. She
queries how best to create work environments that are supportive of mothers to allow them to
remain strategically engaged in the workforce while raising future leaders. Betty is doing the
work on a global scale by helping women become first generation university graduates, to work
after marriage, to raise families while raising their household security. She considers these
women true trailblazers, and she is keen on helping them succeed. Jeannie is very clear in her
expressing her wishes as a leader. “I want to create a collaborative environment where
everybody can bring something to the table, and you’re not going to be doing it in fear.”
Empathy and kindness shine through in the brave actions of these determined women where
today’s choices ensure survival for tomorrow.
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Leading Business With Humility, Patience, and Intuition
Leadership is not a role one studies for. Leadership skills cannot be purchased without
being owned. Leadership behavior is shaped by experiential knowledge honed over time by
witnessing, learning, feeling, and practicing. It is about understanding who to watch and learn
from. The conscious efforts on behalf of fashion's supply chain workers and the planets resources
have challenged the idea of stable business planning. The longtail view taken by sustainability's
female leaders allows for intuition to guide actions. The premiums of sustainable product
manufacturing have tested the two dimensionality of spreadsheet profiteering by confronting the
cost sheet, balance sheet approach to growth. These women leaders did not suddenly materialize
but instead consciously put their efforts into doing the work where their gifts could be used for
good. They did so because of their desire to help, to serve, or to make beautiful and ethical
products that celebrated the craftspeople in the value chain. That desire overrode their own egos.
The designing women of this study are humble about their talents. For Whitney it was
more than designing garments. Could she have built her business in a different way garnering
more financial freedom? Absolutely. Has she faced impossible choices that challenged her to her
core? Yes. Did she consider closing her doors? Yes. Whitney’s commitment goes beyond herself
and a garment or two. She sees herself as a representative for community and is authentically
committed to job development for women. She is not alone with her thoughts. Hanna and the
brand co-founder tearfully discussed closing the brand if they could not bring quantifiable
change to their product development. Hanna dug in and designed the successful strategy
employed today. Jamie's brand was well loved by stores and the press, yet she stepped back,
reimagined her product development time, shaking up the time-honored seasonal product
calendar.
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Cindy feels that her biggest failing was not effectively addressing the impacts of gender
throughout the supply chain. As a humble leader, she wears the failure as her own, as though the
efforts of one brand's champion could topple an oversized system. The commitment to doing
better has been challenged with the risk of failure, yet the radical rethinking strengthened each
brand's statement and the commitments of the designers. Amidst the struggles of the pandemic,
Cindy was proud to share a positive finding. The ECO product line founded in 2004 has
persevered, steadily performing well despite the recent economic woes. The brand founder and
leadership team brought the company together in a concerted effort to align job expectations,
product outcomes, and organizational responsibilities which enabled them to continue on their
material and product commitment regardless of the financial climate hardship. This shared tale
offers hope not only to Cindy’s organization but to those wishing to follow their footsteps.
Conscientious approaches can challenge the idea of short-term program gains yet when a
longtail view can be taken, the cautious actions have proved to pay long-term dividends. Founder
intuition was mentioned as a true north for decision making. Trusting where something feels
right or wrong should empower appropriate decisions. Yet, a growing concern with is the learned
lack of humility as the entitled youth move into the workforce. Concern for women's future
success as leaders remains a fragile tale as the world attempts to struggle forward to a post
pandemic future. It is unclear if kindness and empathy can overrule profit focused agentic
aggression or if the collaborative introvert’s ideas can replace the extrovert ideal.
Discussion Research Question 3
Untangling the past systemic imbalance will enable the future leadership to move forward
unencumbered by wasteful misdirection. For there to be impactful change, those coming up in
the ranks need to see that bucking pejorative practices is possible. The systems have been built to
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work for efficiencies, made from a traditional industry status quo model, can no longer continue.
The old systems need to be reconsidered at each step. Beginning with the training, hiring, and
promotion of those who trained to navigate the practice landmines throughout their careers. The
participants spoke of their positionality, their belief structures, the wrongs they witnessed as they
moved forward in their careers. They spoke of barriers, impasses, and of throwing in their
towels. Yet they did not. Each of the 14 women who shared their thoughts for this study are
creating impacts across fashion’s vast value chain. Women have trained themselves to adapt to
their environments, some adopting the same aggressive, agentic behaviors that their male
colleagues have successfully employed. The queen bees and alpha females can be retrained.
Kindness has emerged as a needed leadership trait that can be modeled and learned to empower
more people to lift up the industry.
Summary of Findings
Women in fashion deal with inequities from design room to factory floor. The
participants are sustainability leaders working to right the wrongs of decades of status quo
practice indiscretions. The social role theory framework pillars guided the research questions
regarding emerging female leadership, navigating industry barriers and biases due to gendered
expectations, personality traits as behavioral influencers, and the goal for leadership role
modeling. Each of the participants shared their experiential tales that laced together their
frustrations, hopes, and expectations for bringing impactful change to future industry. The
conversations unraveled the reality of gendered expectations set in place by layers of societal
behavioral expectations. Regardless of capability, talent, or background, the women each
confronted gender barriers, discrimination, and constraints along their career paths. The
participants shared similar experiences of tempering their responses to be taken seriously or even
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heard, even when they were the most experienced person at the table. Whether to placate the ego
of a male colleague or to sidestep the wrath of a queen bee, the participants trained themselves to
evade conflict to influence positive outcomes. When faced with insurmountable conflict, each of
the women chose to preserve and continue their work as change agents. As leaders, the
participants look to role modeling as a method for ensuring strong female leadership in the
sustainability movement. The topic of introversion and extroversion regarding female leadership
was a surprise discovery in the data gathering. The participants reflected on how their self-
awareness had affected their career growth and how due to their awareness, they had learned to
harness their strengths to guide practice change.
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Chapter Five: Recommendations and Discussion
The final chapter of this dissertation contains the research recommendations and a
discussion of the study findings based on the data analysis. Fourteen female leaders were
purposively sampled and interviewed to provide experiential data from their career tales in the
sustainable fashion arena. The study participants related personal tails of encountering gender
barriers and offered their perspectives of right and wrong, their practice values, and goals for
preserving social justice and planetary resources. The lived experience stories delivered a
perspective of navigating while female within the fashion industry systems. The offered views of
personality traits, perceived abilities, roles, and behavioral expectations for women in the
industry revealed experiences of injustice and inequity that powered the hopes and dreams of a
reconstructed sustainable fashion reality.
Discussion of Findings
The women of sustainability do not compromise their values or their beliefs in right over
wrong for status quo behaviors in the industry they love. The findings of this study show that
women have risen to leadership roles in the sustainability sector because of their conviction to
their ontological belief systems. The literature indicates that sustainability efforts are
championed by those whose personal values and beliefs are their barometers for intentional
behavior (Kennedy & Kray, 2014; Shinbrot et al., 2019). The literature and research support the
ideal for transformational, collaborative, and communal engagement by leadership, especially
important when innovating and challenging behavioral norms found in organizations, industries,
and communities (Schock et al., 2019).
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Choices and Values Lead to Sustainability Practice
Doing the hard right thing is not an option, though it is a conscious choice, driven by
intuition and integrity. Deciding to do the hard right thing is an inherently personal act driven by
one’s ontological perspective. The cacophony and odors of the human-centric activities found in
the world’s garment and textile factories assaulted the participants’ souls, creating visceral
memories. Their experiences, paired with their values, led them to follow their intuition as they
cut through bias barriers to forge new pathways and manifest change leadership in their current
roles. Their value systems were not ego-based, enabling them to build eco-minded enterprises
outside of normative practice expectations. According to each of the participants, leadership
authenticity and personal integrity are vital ingredients for sustainability business and
manufacturing processes. Passionate and compassionate engagement, transformative and
purposive practices, along with consistent, honest, and empathic behavior are defining traits
found in authentic leaders (Northouse, 2019 b) and are terms used by the participants for those
they emulate. The women shared their career histories and how they were challenged for
following their beliefs, often leaving them emotionally and financially unsupported by the macro
industry. Yet, they persevered to deliver new thinking for the fiber, textiles, and apparel supply
chains. To go against the grain, and in these cases challenging industry standards requires grit,
stamina, and a rock-solid belief system (Kennedy & Kray, 2014).
Leading Past Bias and Barriers
Dominated by male leadership, the fashion industry’s growth-focused activities have
helped create the global climate crisis. The abuses, biases, and barriers inside the feminized
industry have perpetuated male dominance while truncating female career opportunities. The
industry’s hiring beliefs position male candidates as higher status hires, considered by decision-
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makers capable of delivering significant business impacts (Abraham, 2020; Hardy III et al.,
2021). The literature and participant reflections of gender discrimination align with women’s
persistent relegation to the less dynamic decision doer roles (Bisom-Rapp & Sargeant, 2016;
Campos Franco et al., 2019; Ulasewicz, 2015, p.100). Due to generations of societal workplace
expectations, women fill the decision doer roles throughout the global supply chain. Culturally
enforced obedience training has domesticated female behaviors of demure acceptance of what is
offered without challenging the status quo by asking for more (Eagly & Carli, 2007; Eagly &
Karau, 2002).
Women are sounding the alarms to bring global awareness to the industry’s exploitation
of humans and natural resources leading to the climate crisis. Women are the ones who have
envisioned and established new practice methodologies (Oelze, 2017; Roshitsh, 2019). Their
decisions challenge the norm, often seen as tangential or antithetical to the greater industry
behaviors (Portway, 2019). As decision doers, the participants encountered cynicism, denial, and
marginalization by the very industry organizations, investors, and partners that purported to
support them, which aligns with the cited literature (Auster & Prasad, 2016; Siddiqui & Uddin,
2016; Stokes, 2017). The stoic tenacity of the participants parallels the literature found regarding
sustainability’s noted female leaders (Curwen et al., 2013; Hatcher & Nguyen Tu, 2017;
Samuelson, 2018). When faced with harassment or abusive behavior from male colleagues, the
participants did their best to shrug it off, determined to keep their jobs and continue doing their
important innovation work while working within a fragile industry ego-system.
Strategies for Female Fashion Leaders: Role Modeling for the Future
Sustainable fashion’s female leaders have risen up as role models for each other and for
the future. Ten of the study’s participants are founders or co-founders of sustainable
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fashion/textile enterprises. Eleven are avowed introverts. Regardless of their personalities or
positions, each participant spoke of the sustainability squad as a community committed to
encouraging future change activists. The participants discussed their challenges of launching
their innovative organizations and of going against the grain of mainstream fashion business.
Coupling a 90% fashion start-up failure rate with only 19% of female designers having the
financial fortitude to begin their own enterprise, the potential for success is minuscule (Vilorio &
Torpey, 2018). Their outside-of-the-box entrepreneurial thinking challenged status quo practices,
often leading them to question their choices and capabilities. Innovative business planning is
often uncomfortable and should challenge normative behaviors (Abraham, 2020). Gender should
not hinder opportunity. Female fashion entrepreneurs state they are challenged with a lack of
female mentors and organizational role models to follow, leaving them to doubt their own
business acuity. This lack of mentoring and role models aligns with the statements of women
across a myriad of industries (Block & Tietjen-Smith, 2016; Bynum, 2015; Dhaliwal, 2010). To
enable more women to move into the leadership pipeline, women need to see themselves in
successful leadership roles (Cain, 2012; Huszco & Engel, 2017; McKinsey, 2020). Two introvert
leaders shared the idea of seeing oneself in leadership roles was shared by two of the introvert
leaders as key for their speaking out about their quiet leadership styles. Each of the participants
volunteered strategies to empower future female leaders enlisting to reform the industry. As role
models, these change agents’ superpowers shine brightly against fashion’s stark growth-
dependent commercialism.
Recommendations for Practice
Going it alone is exhausting and often futile. Sustainability work is teamwork, requiring
the hands and creativity of many. The women of sustainable fashion have created reciprocal
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relationships that reinforce each other’s efforts. Working together, cheering each other on,
raising the veil on status quo secrets to effect change requires intentional collaboration,
teamwork, and commitment from the very industry that has held them from achieving their
dreams. To achieve effective change, those who have spent their careers in the trenches
implementing sustainable methods, processes, and strategies need to guide the journeys of those
who wish to advance the responsible pathway. Untangling the exclusionary gendered behaviors
and transforming historic manufacturing structures requires intentional efforts from those who
have endured the inequities. A revolution in industry practice is essential. Obliterating the
entrenched biased behaviors will require an insurgent uprising. To foment broad value chain
change, a determined deconstruction of the dozens of trade organizations and associations that
perpetuate the industry’s transactional traditions needs to transpire. The status quo leadership
needs to own up to its past behaviors and acknowledge a larger authority: the planet and her
people.
The female sustainability leaders, those who have fought for methodological change
throughout their careers, are already leading the transformation charge to rectify the man-made
crisis. Future female entrepreneurs and leaders must foster a cohesive and inclusive support
system to transform the industry’s transactional traditions. They need allies—collaborators,
mentors, and leaders across industries. They need encouragement and all levels of support to
succeed. They need to receive extended targeted training to act with self-efficacy as they employ
their talents in the industries they adore. Three key recommendations addressing the study
findings are identified and discussed in the following section. Figure 3 offers a visual for
reference of the recommendations delineated in this final chapter.
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Figure 3
Recommendations for a Responsible Fashion Industry
Recommendation 1: Sisterhood of Sustainability Rants: The Society of Collaboration
Integrating sustainable processes into daily workflow requires teamwork. The study
participants were in complete agreement about the power of communal collaboration. They
spoke fondly of sharing resources and cheerleader pep talks from women in the sustainability
trenches. The comradery bolstered them as they ventured further into sustainability business
practices. The collaborative society needs further expansion. It needs to welcome new
practitioners and seasoned warriors alike into the fold. The primary recommendation is the
development of a sustainability society to reach across the apparel, textile, and accessories
sectors and engage practitioners throughout the value chain. The society is an online platform
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created to weave together the people seeking to do the hard right thing: changing an industry.
The platform would bring together existent and emergent populations to spread industry
knowledge and expand women-led business development. The society’s curated sustainability
conversations, mentorship, and coaching opportunities would be augmented with skills training
and workshops. This sustainability platform serves as the structural entity expanding knowledge
and contacts. It is fashioned after several recent successful incubator/accelerator programs such
as Y-Combinator, Rising Tide Accelerator, and the Google for Start-Ups Accelerators. The
platform’s sustainability course offerings reinforce the coursework and focused workshops of the
second and third recommendations. The society would provide mentorship, coaching, training
needed in sustainability, business finance, and entrepreneurship, as well as community-supported
funding opportunities. To innovate an industry, women need to activate their knowledge and
speak up for change. To take on the industry, women need to be trained to roar.
Recommendation 2: Female Financial Prowess Workshops
Financial business planning is not part of art and design creative skills education; thus,
many designers find themselves without the language and tools to present their dreams to
potential investors. Twelve of the 14 study participants spoke of challenges they faced in
receiving the appropriate acknowledgment of their accomplishments in the form of titles and
pay. There is an urgent need for expanded innovative financial training for emergent women
entrepreneurs (Coleman & Robb, 2018).
Salary differentials highlight systemic gender bias. There are over 24,000 working female
fashion designers in the United States paid an average of $10,000 less annually than their male
peers (Fashion Designers, 2022; USBLS, 2021b). The discrepancy impacts the financial
potential of female designers, often crippling their chances for success as entrepreneurs (Brown
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et al., 2018; Maglieri, 2018). A lack of female founders and leaders heightens the awareness of
industry imbalances having unintended impacts on the female workforce pipeline, furthering
corseting the rise of women to the industry’s top roles (Stokes, 2017). The broad organization
implications of a constricted talent pipeline are a 25% decrease in product output and
profitability annually (McKinsey, 2020).
To compound women’s career struggles further, literature identified that they receive less
career advice and mentoring throughout their careers as compared to their male colleagues,
which translates to fewer promotions and increased pay inequity (Brown et al., 2018). Imbalance
in salaries leads to diminished opportunities for entrepreneurship, even though female design
graduates’ desire for advancement and brand ownership is 75% higher than that of their male
peers (Brown et al., 2018). To repair the gendered career injustices impinging women’s success,
women need to elevate their self-efficacy. They need to have their dreams supported and to
change fashion’s leadership imbalance mentors, targeted business training, and financial
investment from angel investors and venture capitalists are needed (Coleman & Robb, 2018). In
addition, women need tailored training to take them beyond their design school training to find
financial success in business (Hunt et al., 2021). The Women in the Workplace report highlights
organizational gains of more than 25% above-average profitability when led by female
executives (McKinsey, 2020).
Asking for money is hard. Access to capital has been the domain of the men who control
the capital. The second recommendation emerging from the study data addresses the need for
funding availability in the forms of angel investment, grants, and equity finance earmarked for
women-founded and led enterprises. Financial literacy training crafted to enable the women to
determine their fiscal business needs, to approach the right organizations for support, and to
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identify appropriate investment partnerships for their growing fiscally responsible entities would
be offered annually through the sustainability society. Women have historically downplayed
their financial ambitions to the detriment of their personal finances and of their companies.
Culture has crafted the workplace expectations for women. Women need retraining so they can
support their own success. Fiscally enlightened female leadership will amplify sustainable
fashion’s practice victories.
Recommendation 3: Empowered Entrepreneurship Training for Women
Women need to believe in their individual capabilities to deliver successful business
change when they step forward in their rightful roles of entrepreneurs (National Women’s
Business Council [NWBC], 2017). Emergent and established female founders need tailored
online entrepreneurial training crafted to assist with business structure lessons focused on
developing successful and responsible enterprises. To achieve gender parity across the globe in
the decision directing roles of creative director, founder, and CEO, women must accelerate their
business understanding. In the words of one participant, “women must work twice as hard for
half the recognition.” If women fill the sustainability leadership pipeline, they will be the leaders
and the role models that break the industry’s normative patterns (Kephart & Schumacher, 2005;
Shinbrot et al., 2019). Raising women to demand action and not demure to deadlines will help
them break societal rules. Coaching women to become change agents will increase the potential
for leadership change enabling practice shifts, opening wide the expectation for industry change.
Basic business experience insecurities often plague founders whose formal education and
experience focus on specific industry outcomes. Typically underfunded, fashion start-ups have a
failure rate of over 90% within the first two years post-launch (USBLS, 2021a). For women to
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find their success as sustainable business founders, they need training beyond the lessons learned
at design school.
The final recommendation is the development of entrepreneurial bootcamps designed by
women for women, delivering entrepreneurial tools and training. These bootcamps support
women by bolstering their business knowledge and thus self-efficacy through proprietary
training provided by experienced mentors and peers. In addition, the business development
workshops would augment the sustainable society’s financial coursework and the sustainability
lessons.
A subset recommendation for the finance and entrepreneurship workshops is the support
of emergent technological innovation for use across the fashion industry’s vast value chain. The
industry’s next steps are to universally adopt sustainability-based processes and methodologies
while innovating daily workplace practices. All steps in the manufacturing supply chain and
across the product development value chain need to reconsider the human engagement impacts
to enable investments to correct status quo activities (Dunne, 2015; Ulasewicz, 2015). Women
have begun the change-making implementation by creating collaborative sustainability tools.
Emergent AI innovations in the textile and apparel manufacturing sectors will accelerate the
adoption of new manufacturing methods that will affect global workforce populations, requiring
the restructuring of the fashion workplace. Technology will evolve global manufacturing, the
impact of which will lead to the necessary retooling of the workforce. Developing technologies
to enable workplace innovation aligning responsible supply-chain behaviors with safety for
humans and the planet is imperative for the future health of the fashion industry.
Financial Futuring and Empowering Entrepreneurship coursework would run as 4–6
weeklong modules, coordinating with the society’s topical sustainability modules. The weekly
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synchronous coursework, supported by asynchronous units, focuses the lessons on the modules’
overall learning goals, enabling participants to acquire the knowledge and consider implementing
it in their organizations while enrolled in the training programs. The online workshops enable
practitioners of varying proficiency levels to engage fully with the programming from their home
offices and studios worldwide. The proprietary seminar tools are delivered by industry experts
with the expectation that the participants can reinforce their learning in their daily practices,
further expanding the training outcomes. The recommended coursework enables participants to
gain the knowledge needed to implement the learning in their daily routines. Mentoring
assignments would match business needs and individual personalities. Mentorship sessions are
separate from programming timing, treated as after-hours sessions. The sessions would be
scheduled to suit the participants’ and mentors’ calendars as well as expertise. Suggested
mentoring would occur within 12 months with between two and eight sessions. Table 8 identifies
the Sustainability Society Workshops and Training sessions.
Table 8:
Sustainability Society Trainings and Workshops
Workshop Asynchronous
study time
Synchronous
course time
Times per
year
Modules per
course
Sustainability series 8 hours 8 hours 4 4
Financial futuring 8–10 hours 8 hours 1 4
Empowered entrepreneurship 10–12 hours 12 hours 2 6
Mentoring As needed As needed 2–8 –
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Gender bias persists in the lack of mentorship and business training available for women.
It lurks in the lower levels of venture investment and board engagement, further damaging
women’s potential entrepreneurial success rates (Winn, 2005). To create and successfully run
scalable and sustainable fashion enterprises, the women in fashion need training beyond their
skills and aesthetic education to encourage their self-efficacy as successful entrepreneurs. They
need to learn how to ask for money, but before that, they need to first apply to the places where
help is available (Hunt et al., 2019). Increasing the success rates of women’s leadership pipeline
will encourage business investment and gender parity for the whole industry. If industry
leadership changes, then the expectations for practicing will change, and an industry will be
enabled to change.
Limitations and Delimitations
The phenomenological approach of this descriptive qualitative study does not provide for
generalizability. Instead, this study focuses on the reflected experiences of women leaders in the
sustainability sector of the fashion industry. Like most qualitative studies, this study’s findings
focus on an in-depth analysis of the shared lived individual experiences of the sample
interviewees (Merriam & Tisdell, 2016). Participants were questioned about their careers
regarding beliefs, witnessed behaviors, barriers, goals, and expectations. Their memories may
have biased their feelings regarding former jobs, organizations, and the industry, due to the
growing awareness of the industry’s practice impacts. The individual’s memories could have
triggered emotions, leading to variance in the data collected and might confound the findings.
While some of the participants were not trained to consider sustainability as a target in their
careers, they spoke of their personal ethos, values, and socio-cultural beliefs as the ideologies
that led them to fashion’s sustainability movement. Participants’ personal reasons for joining the
119
sustainable fashion sector added complexity to the study but did not detract from the data
collection. Pervasive gender inequity is undeniable in the fashion industry (Brown et al., 2018;
Stokes, 2015). The participants were impacted in their careers by the industry’s gender
inequities.
Extensive field notes taken during each interview chronicled the unspoken interviewee
actions and mannerisms and supported the trustworthiness and credibility of the research.
Additionally, a reflective journal captured the considered impressions following each recorded
conversation. The journal entries added nuanced depth to the video transcripts supporting
specific terminology, overall response tone, data contractions, and physical response reactions.
Research concerns and potential biases were identified in the journal notes, further supporting
inquiry transparency.
Recommendations for Future Research
Little research exists regarding the fashion industry, gender bias in industry leadership, or
how gender bias affects the female majority working in the industry. In addition, less research
exists regarding women in fashion’s sustainability sector, their business innovations, or their
change leadership. This phenomenological study explicitly focused on the women who are
bringing change to the sustainable fashion movement. Three future research areas emerged from
the interviews, each addressing an aspect of the career inequity faced by women and BIPOC in
feminized industries. First, future research is needed to address the imbalances of female fashion
students and female entry-level design employees compared to the male majority leading
fashion’s top brands and labels in the roles of CEO, COO, and Creative Director (CD). The
gender imbalance has disenfranchised the industry’s workforce majority, where women collide
with societal gender expectations limiting careers and dreams. This research topic would add to
120
the data gathered by the 2018 Glass Runway survey (Brown et al.) and by foundational research
of Allyson Stokes (2015; 2017).
The second future research recommendation focuses on female successes in
sustainability-focused businesses. This research would seek to understand how transformational
leadership role expectations intersect with entrepreneurship and innovative business
development expectations. In addition, anticipated research would address female performance
expectations and gendered constraints related to fiscal support, capital investment, and look to
overhaul the staid systems to expand inclusive leadership and practice innovation. Although
women have received the same aesthetic training and have the same capacity for entrepreneurial
creative successes, they lack the afforded opportunity.
The existing research highlights the stories of established fashion designers whose
businesses are the existing industry pillars of today’s sustainable fashion movement (Curwen et
al., 2013; Heitzmann & Lui, 2018; Roshitsh, 2019; Samuelson, 2018; Shinbrot et al., 2019). The
third recommendation for future investigation is researching growth-efficiency models for
reconsidering industry scale. Retooling status quo practices to determine right-size production
models will offer insight for responsible manufacturing activities while addressing values-driven
quadruple bottom line structures. Future research would address new measures of success
initiated by change leadership that extend far beyond the old profit and loss growth trajectory.
There is little research focusing on the impacts found in correcting the fashion industry’s
business values and purpose leadership. The existing research identifies the need to invoke
industry change (Hiller Connell & Kozar 2017; House of Commons Environmental Audit
Committee, 2018; Trigg, 2006). Potential future research would involve longevity studies
121
investigating sustainability process successes and failures, enabling organizations to move
forward using scientific data to support innovation in practice and business methodologies.
Future quantitative research would expand the available literature on sustainability
actions and outcomes for the fashion and textiles industries. Future research would encourage the
implementation of new approaches to manufacturing, identify the successes of the scaled
manufacturing activities, thus suggesting generalizability unachievable with qualitative
interviews. Future research could identify potential negative manufacturing impacts, social
justice implications, and environmental repercussions, allowing for causal reflection and
proactive attention.
Gender Equity Connection to the Rossier Mission
The fashion industry is considered a feminized industry with a 75% female consumer
base and an 80% female employee population. Yet the industry is dominated by male leadership
whose authority and transactional agenda have led to the marginalization of women and
destruction of natural resources. This dissertation posits that women have created a robust
sustainable fashion sector and are leading industry practice changes to ensure equitable and
responsible systems implementation across the globe. The recommendations for expanding
women’s leadership expertise in the sustainable fashion field through focused training are
aligned with The Rossier School of Education at the University of Southern California’s mission
to “Prepare leaders to achieve educational equity through practice, research, and policy.” By
improving women’s knowledge, their business outcomes opportunities will expand and help
reconstruct an industry’s practices that have negatively impacted the planet and the global
workforce.
122
This study parallels the Rossier School of Education’s mission. It identifies how female
leaders in the $3.2 trillion-dollar global fashion industry are reshaping practice changes with
innovative thinking founded from their values, beliefs, and experiential knowledge. The study
reveals how these women work together to share their learnings in order to improve industry
practices impacting every person on the globe, whether they work in factories, dye houses, and
design studios or simply don wearable products. The study shared the lived experiences of
today’s female leaders who are seeking to improve the industry for all who work in it and for it.
Women are more than capable of leading change when not constrained by gender and race bias,
practice barriers, and role expectations. Women are forces of nature when they link arms with an
army of like-minded community members to champion change. The traditions that tethered them
to the status quo have unraveled.
Conclusion for Sustainable Fashion’s Female Leadership
Society and culture have conspired to hold women to the hearth, constricting their
advance into the c-suites and boardrooms of industry. Women’s career confinement is not due to
lesser abilities, mental weakness, or conceptual fragility (Eagly & Carli, 2007; Eagly & Steffen,
1984). The systemic suppression of funding, mentorship, and communal support has worn-out
women’s self-efficacy leading them to question their abilities and their dreams. Equitable
opportunities in fashion have shrunken like wool cardigans thrown into a dryer. The male-
dominated majority leadership of the feminized fashion industry has created a man-made toxic
environment with its profit-focused hunger for growth supported by trade organizations and
associations protecting the status quo. Factories far away have collapsed, crushing workers
building fast fashion. The oceans of the globe are swimming in microfiber plastics. Fashion
females have suffered #MeToo harassment in the studios, sales offices, and on the runways
123
without reparations. The youth of today are striking for the climate, screaming for action. It is
time for a new society to be born. A community of women have responded to fashion’s
sustainability call and are fast at work doing the hard right things.
Sustainability’s female leaders must rise together to break the doctrines of destruction
and light the way forward for the army of passionate women wishing to break their chains. For
there to be a sustainable and responsible fashion industry, one that engages equitably with the
female majority, the entrenched practices and processes throughout the entire global value chain
need to be revolutionized. A reconstructed industry requires the committed arbiters of change to
work together to transform the industry’s destructive cultural norms. The participants are women
warriors who have fought for aesthetics, social justice, environmental responsibility, and supply
chain innovation while ensuring sustainable financial viability. They have championed their
imposters and the queen bees. They have navigated career mazes and maneuvered past gender
bias barriers. They have persisted in protecting the people, the planet, and the dream of fashion
while leading the charge for a responsible industry. The time has come to construct a fully
sustainable fashion ecosystem. It is time to do the hard right thing.
124
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Appendix A: Interview Protocol
The following research questions guide this study and seek to offer insight into the
women leading the sustainability movement in the fashion and textile industry.
1. To what degree are women emerging as the leaders of the sustainable fashion movement?
2. What factors have inspired sustainable fashion's female leaders to transcend society's role
barriers to become leaders of change?
3. To what extent will sustainable fashion's female leaders become the role models for
industry practice innovation?
Participants: 14 Women leaders in the field of sustainable fashion.
Introduction to the Interview:
Thank you for agreeing to this interview and being part of my dissertation research study.
This interview will take about an hour. I too have spent my career in the fashion industry as a
trained fashion designer with 37 years of experience in the field of fashion. My dissertation is
focused on female leadership in sustainable fashion, honing-in on what led these women to
champion the industry’s sustainability movement. In the last 22 years, I have taught the business
of fashion design to emerging designers at two Art and Design Colleges on the West Coast and
have honed my focus to help designers and entrepreneurs build sustainability into their practices
and product development framework.
I hope that you will allow me to record our conversation so that I can ensure that I
capture your responses correctly. Would that be acceptable to you? Once the interview has been
completed, I will transcribe our conversation and share it with you electronically to ensure that I
have appropriately captured your thoughts. If corrections or updates are needed, I will make
145
them. I believe that tomorrow’s young design hopefuls need to learn how you navigated your
career story to encourage them on the path ahead.
The goal of this interview is for you to share your fashion and sustainability stories. I will
ask a series of questions, and we will see what unfolds from there. Your participation is entirely
voluntary. You may skip any questions you do not want to answer, and you may stop this
interview at any time. I will record the interview to help me capture all of your responses wholly
and accurately. This recording will not be shared with anyone outside the scope of this project. If
you would like me to stop recording at any point, I will do so. The recording will be transferred
to my password-protected files on a cloud file storage account and will be deleted from the
recording device immediately upon recording transcription. I will be using Zoom to transcribe
the recording directly. The recording and all other data will be destroyed after three years from
the date my dissertation defense is approved. Lastly, to help our industry expand best practices
for equitable behavior and responsible manufacturing, would you be willing to share your name
and your company name/position for the purposes of validity and credibility of this dissertation
study?
Do you have any questions about the study before we get started? If not, please review
and keep the information sheet. I would like your permission to begin the interview. May I also
have your consent to record this conversation? Thank you. The study’s interview protocol is
presented in Table A1.
146
Table9A1
Interview Protocol
Interview questions Potential probes Key concept
addressed
What originally drew you to
the fashion/textile industry
for a career?
What was your first job in/related to the
industry?
When was that first job?
Did you go to school for this career? If
so, for how long?
Conventional
fashion
What led you to shift your
fashion job/career path
towards sustainability?
How did was this different from your
original fashion goal?
What was that first position in
sustainability? What was different
from your other jobs in fashion?
Conventional
fashion
Reflecting over your career
in the field, could you
share how you, as a
woman, were treated?
Did you receive positive
acknowledgment for your efforts? Tell
me about this?
Were your friends/classmates being
recognized at the same rate? Or
promoted similarly?
Would you explain that experience and
how that felt?
Conventional
fashion
During your time in the
industry, what examples
of gender bias or gender
inequities have you
personally encountered or
witnessed?
Has anyone you have known
experienced gender preferential
treatment or bias? Tell me about it.
Have you experienced: pay inequity or
promotional inequity?
What are your thoughts about press
coverage related to male or female
fashion creativity?
Inequity or
exclusion
Fashion has its own
documented gender
barrier, the Glass Runway
(Stokes, 2015). What
inappropriate behaviors
have you faced or
witnessed in an industry
where questionable
behaviors are beginning
to be spoken about?
Have you had to deal with sexual
harassment in the form of innuendo or
inappropriate behavior from
colleagues?
How might your career have been
influenced by what you endured or
witnessed?
Inequity or
exclusion
147
Interview questions Potential probes Key concept
addressed
How were you able to
successfully navigate
around the industry
barriers?
Please tell me a story where you were
successful in staying on your path.
If you could shift one outcome, what
change would you have wished for?
Inequity or
exclusion
When did you make the
career shift into
sustainability work - what
prompted this shift?
Tell me what you witnessed that made
you consider the leap.
Sustainability,
inequity, or
exclusion
What barriers, if any, have
you encountered in the
sustainability sector?
Did your career shift have anything to
do with inequity in the workplace?
What has been your biggest
challenge on your
sustainability path?
How do you stay motivated? Sustainability
Equity or ethics: What does
this mean for you and
your work?
Sustainability
Did you have a role model
for your work in the
sustainability movement?
If so, please do tell me
about it. If not, what
would you have wished
for in a role model?
Do you have a mentor today?
Would you like to be a mentor for
someone else?
Role models and
mentoring
What piece of your story do
you feel lead you to the
role you hold today?
Role models and
mentoring
What one piece of key
leadership advice would
you give to young women
wanting to follow in your
footsteps?
Role models,
mentoring,
leadership
Do you consider yourself an
introvert or an extrovert?
148
Conclusion to the Interview:
I appreciate you sharing your career story with me. I am looking forward to hearing your
tales from the field. I am going to move forward from our time today and transcribe this
interview. If you have any questions or concerns, please do not hesitate to reach out to me. My
goal is to analyze the data you shared today so that I can bring our industry a better appreciation
of the hard work that has been done by women in the field of sustainable fashion and textiles
design and manufacturing. Would you be willing to have a follow-up conversation if there is
important information that I neglected to include in my questioning?
Thank you again for your time today and for sharing your lived experiences with me for
my study. I look forward to sharing my study with you.
Interview questions Potential probes Key concept
addressed
What one word would you
use to describe your
personality in forging
ahead as a leader of
sustainability
methodology/practice?
Abstract (if available)
Abstract
Women are leading the sustainability movement in the fashion industry by challenging traditional practice expectations and championing practice change. This study investigates the phenomenon of the sustainable fashion movement’s female leaders and the variables that led them to step forward as industry change agents. The global fashion industry generates $3.2 trillion dollars in annual revenue, employs 60 million people, and generates over 45 million tons of textile waste each year. The feminized industry is dominated by male leadership that oversees and directs female employee followership from the factory floor to the design studio and runway. The fashion industry’s global behaviors are harming the planet and constricting the employment opportunities for its female population. The sustainability movement confronts the status quo by pushing against traditional industry practices. Women are challenging practice norms and career expectations by advancing fashion’s sustainability movement. Social role theory is the theoretical framework underpinning this phenomenological field study investigating the gender barriers, social role expectations, and personality traits that have led to sustainable fashion’s female leadership.
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PDF
Gender inequity and leadership in the large state militia: an innovation study
Asset Metadata
Creator
Williams, Amelia B.
(author)
Core Title
Sustainable fashion leadership: The female phenomenon
School
Rossier School of Education
Degree
Doctor of Education
Degree Program
Organizational Change and Leadership (On Line)
Degree Conferral Date
2022-05
Publication Date
11/04/2022
Defense Date
02/10/2022
Publisher
University of Southern California
(original),
University of Southern California. Libraries
(digital)
Tag
fashion industry,female leadership,gender bias,OAI-PMH Harvest,social role theory,sustainable fashion
Format
application/pdf
(imt)
Language
English
Contributor
Electronically uploaded by the author
(provenance)
Advisor
Datta, Monique Claire (
committee chair
), Maddox, Anthony (
committee member
), Martinez, Brandon (
committee member
)
Creator Email
ameliawi@usc.edu,amywilliams.studio@gmail.com
Permanent Link (DOI)
https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-oUC110768082
Unique identifier
UC110768082
Legacy Identifier
etd-WilliamsAm-10415
Document Type
Dissertation
Format
application/pdf (imt)
Rights
Williams, Amelia B.
Type
texts
Source
20220308-usctheses-batch-915
(batch),
University of Southern California
(contributing entity),
University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses
(collection)
Access Conditions
The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the author, as the original true and official version of the work, but does not grant the reader permission to use the work if the desired use is covered by copyright. It is the author, as rights holder, who must provide use permission if such use is covered by copyright. The original signature page accompanying the original submission of the work to the USC Libraries is retained by the USC Libraries and a copy of it may be obtained by authorized requesters contacting the repository e-mail address given.
Repository Name
University of Southern California Digital Library
Repository Location
USC Digital Library, University of Southern California, University Park Campus MC 2810, 3434 South Grand Avenue, 2nd Floor, Los Angeles, California 90089-2810, USA
Repository Email
cisadmin@lib.usc.edu
Tags
fashion industry
female leadership
gender bias
social role theory
sustainable fashion