ANNUAL REPORT
OUR MISSION
Equality Action Center at UC Law SF seeks to advance racial, gender, and class equality in the workplace and in politics. Our initiatives address inequality at a structural level with concrete, evidence-based interventions. We lead programs that cultivate leadership and level the playing field for everyone. Our focus is pragmatic: our rigorous research is linked with practical steps to produce social or organizational change within a two- to fiveyear time frame.
OUR TEAM
JOAN C. WILLIAMS FOUNDING DIRECTOR
DR. RACHEL KORN RESEARCH DIRECTOR
DR. ASMA GHANI LEAD RESEARCH SCIENTIST
CHELSEY CROWLEY PROGRAM MANAGER
RYAN MALEK-MAPLE PROGRAM ASSOCIATE
ALINA KILCULLEN RESEARCH & POLICY FELLOW
A WORD FROM OUR DIRECTOR
We live in interesting times. We have spent this year turning risks into opportunities.
DEI work.
This year our diversity and inclusion work continued, supported by a generous grant from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation that allowed us to work with 14 companies to implement Bias Interrupters in performance evaluations and 14 in access to careerenhancing work opportunities. Again, we had a measurable impact in most companies, and a dramatic impact in some.
Performance evaluations workstream. A large multinational company created an entirely new performance evaluation system focused on specific competencies in need of improvement, along with a training academy to help employees develop skills identified in their evaluations. We ran a pilot where leaders identified common forms of bias using the Bias Interrupters framework, with plans for a rollout for managers. They also plan to collect metrics going forward, so can they can ensure that the new evaluations and training academy provide a level playing field for all groups.
Access to opportunities workstream.
A large retail company found that managers were far more conscientious about supplying their supporting evidence for why someone should be promoted when they knew their recommendations would go through without it.
“Is the evidence supporting the decision…If we're looking at the rubric being used, if there's not enough evidence, we don't get to move that candidate forward.”
Requiring evidence is a powerful Bias Interrupter.
NSF grant. This year was a roller-coaster, with our NSF grant terminated by the Trump Administration before being reinstated as a result of a lawsuit by University of California, San Francisco, with whom we are co-PIs on our grant. The entire Department of Medicine, the largest unit at UCSF, took our 10-minute climate Workplace Experiences Survey, which picks up every basic pattern of bias based on race, gender and class. We found the same kinds of biases we have found repeatedly in many different kinds of organizations, along with some notable differences. Moreover, we found something we have never found before: South Asian women reported very high levels of bias, comparable to Black women and Latinas. Unfortunately, the massive upheaval, in which many NSF, NHI and other federal grants were rescinded, took place in the middle of our Access to Opportunities experiment. As a result, the overall number of valued workplace opportunities reported by division chiefs fell sharply for all groups but not Asian American women. For them, the number of opportunities recorded rose slightly, raising the question about whether Bias Interrupters had managed to help the medical school make progress towards a level playing field even in the face of the huge contraction in opportunities overall.
Our business plan tanked.
Simultaneously, two other developments undermined the business plan that kept the Center afloat for 17 years. First, the Administration leaned heavily on law firms to discontinue their women’s leadership programming. This ultimately led to the demise of our new –and dazzlingly successful Partner Accelerator Program for law-firm associates. Ultimately, it also killed off the Leadership Academy (LAW). Designed for women partners (though it has always been open to all), LAW had been one of the preeminent programs in the country for fifteen years. Meanwhile, our other major nongrant source of funding, our Bias Interrupters diversity and inclusion consulting, dried up almost completely overnight. As a result, we have had to close down our Bias Interrupters work.
A new direction.
We are now focused upstream of workplace bias work that has been our focus for the last decade, giving that the rise of the far right has wiped out the conditions that made DEI possible. With support from a generous grant from the Marguerite Casey Foundation, we are using our “evidence for action” approach to explore how defend democracy and forge coalitions capable of making progress on climate change, abortion rights, immigration, the care economy, gun policy, and LGBTQIA+ issues. We found that we could move public opinion sharply on most of these issues by “reframing” changing messaging, policy priorities, or both to tap into working-class values.
This is part of a series of projects in partnership with Jared Abbott of Cal Tech, best known as the founder of the Center for Working Class Politics. Our report will be published in June 2026.
To get a sense of our new work on class, take the Class Bubble Quiz: https://www.classbubblequiz.com/.
We already have over 16,000 respondents but would love to hear from you, too!
Joan C Williams Founding Director -
ACCESS TO OPPORTUNITIES IN MEDICINE (ATOM)
PROJECT
The ATOM (Access to Opportunities in Medicine) project was launched to address a major, but fixable, reason that women, and women of color in particular, leave the medical field – unfair access to career-enhancing opportunities. Equality Action Center, in partnership with University of California San Francisco, launched the Workplace Experiences Survey (WES) to investigate employee’s perceptions of workplace culture and opportunities available to them and to determine whether there was a level playing field for all groups Our results showed significant disparities between groups –with Black women, Latinas, and South Asian women reporting some of the worst workplace experiences.
In addition, we created the Faculty Tasking Tool, an evidence-based digital tool that allows Division Chiefs of a medical department to easily and systematically track the allocation of work opportunities given to their research faculty. Results showed disparities in the types of opportunities assigned to various groups. To address these disparities, we created an evidence-based scalable intervention – a customized workshop for the Division Chiefs based on the data collected from the WES and the Tasking Tool, along with strategies to ensure that all groups can have fair access to opportunities in the workplace.
BIAS INTERRUPTERS: FAIR ACCESS
AND EQUAL OPPORTUNITY
Supported by a generous grant from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, Equality Action Center worked with 14 companies on their performance evaluations system and 14 companies on access to career-enhancing opportunities to help them make sustainable changes towards leveling the playing field for all employees
72% of our companies were able to implement changes to interrupt bias in their systems and started to see measurable progress in a short time period Key findings from this study are documented in our most recent published working paper, “Creating sustainable change with everyday practices to level the playing field.” The paper also includes links to our evidence-based Bias Interrupters toolkits – freely available resources that have been accessed over half a million times on our website –which companies can use to level the playing field for all groups.
LEADERSHIP EDGE
Leadership Edge (LE) is a membership program for organizations that strive to level the playing field by addressing the structures that contribute to bias An alternative to one-off trainings inspiring shortterm action, Leadership Edge is designed to provide sustained support to orgs working to push the needle forward.
Programming includes leadership training, professional skill building, and action-oriented conversations around race, gender and first-generation professionals in the workplace. Access is org-wide and designed for both individuals and leaders, enabling organizations to effectively retain, support, and advance diverse talent from within and ensuring a consistent employee experience for all