Catherine Tinsley, Ph.D., is a professor of management at Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business, Faculty Director of the Georgetown University Women’s Leadership Institute, Academic Director of Georgetown McDonough’s Executive Master’s in Leadership program, and a Senior Policy Scholar at the Georgetown Center for Business and Public Policy. Tinsley is an expert on gender intelligent leadership, gender parity and workforce development, negotiations, and decision making. For the past two years, she participated in The World Economic Forum’s annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland where she spoke about the role of confidence in women’s economic empowerment. In 2012 and 2013, she partnered with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce to study a decade of gender in the C-suite—researching how women fared relative to men in publicly traded companies from 2000-2010.
She is currently doing field research with two Fortune 500 firms and one Fortune 100 firm, analyzing the implications of various corporate policies and structures for women’s advancement. Tinsley also has collaborated with the White House and U.S. State Department to execute a woman-to-woman mentorship summit and has partnered with the U.S. State Department and the Council of Women World Leaders to convene the first ever world-wide meeting of the Ministers of Women’s Affairs.
In addition to her research around gender issues, Tinsley has received several grants from NASA, the National Science Foundation, and the Department of Homeland Security for her work on decision making and risk and from the Department of Defense and Army Research Office for her work on modeling culture’s influence on negotiation and collaboration. Tinsley has served on three committees for the National Academy of Sciences— The Committee to Improve Intelligence Analysis for National Security, The Committee on Unifying Social and Cultural Frameworks in the Military, and the Committee on The Context of Military Environments (where she served as vice-Chair).
She has won various academic rewards for her research. In addition to her research on gender dynamics in organizations, she studies how factors such as culture, reputations, and gender influence negotiation and conflict resolution. She also studies how people make decisions under risk, applying decision analytic frameworks to understand organizational disasters, and individual and expert responses to natural disasters (such as hurricanes) and man-made disasters (terrorist attacks).
Tinsley has published more than 50 articles and book chapters in peer-reviewed journals, including: Management Science, Academy of Management Review, Journal of Applied Psychology, Organization Behavior and Human Decision Processes, American Sociological Review, Journal of Economic Psychology, Research in Organizational Behavior, Journal of International Business Studies, Negotiation and Conflict Management Research, Research on Negotiations in Organizations, Negotiation Journal, Journal of Applied Social Psychology, Applied Psychology, International Negotiation: A journal of Theory and Practice, and International Perspectives on Organizational Justice. She currently is on the editorial board of Organization Behavior and Human Decision Processes, International Negotiations: A Journal of Theory and Practice, and International Journal of Conflict Management. She is a past editorial board member of the Academy of Management Journal.
Tinsley has conducted numerous negotiations, conflict resolution, and leadership training seminars for various organizations, including: the staff of the U.S. Senate, Rolls Royce N.A., Gucci, Rio Tinto, Sprint-Nextel, Nextel, Verizon, the World Bank, DPT Laboratories, Ferro, Lamson & Sessions, Rhode & Schwarz, the International Securities Management Association, the General Clinical Research Center, and the Korean International Trade Association. She also has conducted negotiations trainings for managers of a variety of companies, and within a variety of cultures, including: Germany, Japan, Korea, Slovenia, Hong Kong, India and Mexico.
She received her Master’s and Ph.D. in Organizational Behavior from J.L. Kellogg Graduate School of Management at Northwestern University, and her BA in anthropology from Bryn Mawr College.