Mentoring Roundtable: Women in Leadership

Photo by Meina Yin on Unsplash

I had a chance to serve as a mentor for a “Women in Leadership” section at a conference recently. Since most of my presentations are tied to my research (see more here), this was a fun opportunity, AND I figured that as I prepared my notes, I’d create this this post and make a landing page of the resources I reference (or not depending on the conversation) and also some reflections too~

​The Importance of Language
As my most recent article notes (Cho & Johnson, 2025) and previous resource post, words matter. I’ve reflected previously about the work from scholars like Trix & Psenka (2003) about the importance of language for things like letters of recommendation. Likewise, Ben Schmidt created this resource where you can see the gendered language in teaching reviews. While I’ve referenced both resources often, as an unintended application, I’ve also translated this tool to writing my own cover letters, pitches, and self-introductions as ways to make sure I’m speaking to my technical skills, not just my passion, compassion, or emotion-oriented capacity. To be clear, the latter groups are also important (and deeply tied to my research), and it’s also a response of recognizing the gendered ways women’s skills are more often than not, described overwhelmingly through gendered carework and emotional labor (see Premilla Nadesen’s, 2023, “Care: The Highest Stage of Capitalism”; The Care Collective’s, 2020 “The Care Manifesto”). 

Knowing Your Worth: Taking Up Space & Negotiating
This conference for which I served as a mentor is geared towards Korean and Korean American scientists and engineers. As a social scientist, I think a lot about the intersections of gender, race, immigration, and generation status. Plenty of existing research has documented the ways Women of Color, including Asian and Asian American women, are underpaid and undervalued for their research. While this is very much a systemic issue (tied to larger structures of genderism, racism, xenophobia, etc.), I have also deeply appreciated possible and tangle strategies to help me on an individual, navigational level (while we keep fighting these larger systems of oppression). Here are some of the ones I’ve most appreciated: 

• Harvard Business Review’s series of “Women at Work” has had some gems (not all of which I’ve listened to, so this isn’t a wholesale endorsement— though, let’s be real, I rarely ever give a wholesale endorsement, ha!). I’ve specifically enjoyed their episodes on: 
• Seeing Ourselves as Leaders (which was the first one I listened to and offered some great advice about how take up space)
• Negotiating Strategically (title says it all)
• And then these two specifically about working with others: The Essentials of Managing Up and The Essentials of Delegating Effectively (the latter, which as been instrumental for me)

Choosing Yourself & Maintaining Boundaries
I feel like I need to first acknowledge that my skills to maintain my boundaries, say “no,” choose myself, have work-life balance, feels like a never ending struggle. And in many ways— like how the original developers of imposter phenomenon remind us that it’s not a syndrome where we wake up one day feeling like an imposter, but instead, it’s a reflection of the societal pressures and messaging we receive— the ability to have balance and boundaries is deeply tied to the demands put on us and the expectations of being a Person of Color/Asian/Korean American woman. As I’ve continued to navigate this journey, here are some resources (I’m a podcast girly so to the surprise of no one…): 

• From the podcast We Can Do Hard Things, “7 Questions to reclaim Yourself with Dr. Thema Bryant” 
• Mimi Khúc’s work in general is a GEM and “Dear Elia: Letters for an Asian American Abyss” remains one of my most favorite and cherish books (that also reads me for filth! My goodness, I am CALLED IN/OUT constantly in this book and I love it, but also hate it, but love it). Here’s an interview clip of what she describes as a “pedagogy of unwellness”:

Complicating Support & Being in Community
Given that my research, in part, is about the intersections of labor and organizational theory, one of my central foci is trying to understand what exactly is “support.” While I’m contextualized within colleges and universities, (and this is certainly a critique for myself too), I think support is often thrown around as an important thing to be doing, but what do we mean exactly when we say it?

This question became the underlying driver for one of my research teams and through interviews with racially minoritized campus staff, we realized that there’s a distinction between, for example “institutional support” and “relational support” (Cho et al., 2025). Think of having a great supervisor, but the overall office or campus culture is not supportive; it means you are supported only as long as your supervisor is there. And that’s helped me think thru when I have people around me asking how I want to be supported, considering the level and layers of institutional support. How do I move from being a relationally supportive, to helping create the operational and programmatic support that eventually gets to the institutional support? This has also helped shape how I then support the people who report to me too, and how this translates to the type of change I’m hoping to create as a leader. 

And what all of these resources emphasize is the importance of community— that Women in Leadership isn’t just something that we do on our own, but necessitates being in relationship with one another. It’s not a coincidence that a lot of the resources I’ve shared are ones that friends and femors have sent me. And for those in academia, outside of this "Me"-Sourced page, here are some of "Out"-Sourced resources that have been collective support for me~ ​