Melissa Fisher, PhD

Melissa Fisher, Ph.D., a cultural anthropologist, is a Senior Advisor at CFAR Consulting and Coaching Services, and a Distinguished Principal Research Fellow in the Human Capital Center at the Conference Board. She is also affiliated with New York University’s Institute for Public Knowledge and School of Professional Studies, as well as the Global Foresight Project based out of the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Studies.

Previously, she held full time faculty positions at Georgetown University, New York University’s College of Arts and Sciences, and the University of Copenhagen. Melissa’s expertise lies in gender, culture, and work. Her first single authored book, Wall Street Women (Duke University Press, 2012) examined the careers, networks, and leadership practices of the first generation of women in finance. She has also written on alternative forms of leadership in women’s worker cooperatives in Brooklyn and Berlin. Her book in progress focuses on if and how workplace experts are imagining, designing, and building more equitable, just, and sustainable workplaces in an age of pandemics and social movements like Black Lives Matter and #Me Too, or reproducing hierarchies of gender, race, class, and power. Melissa’s work has been featured in publications such as The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, CNBC, NPR, and the BBC.

She has delivered hundreds of keynote speeches and talks worldwide. She serves on a number of boards, including The Women Creating Change Leadership Council at Columbia University’s Center for Social Difference and is a US Delegate to the W20, the gender advisory group to the G20. She is graduate of Barnard College and received her Ph.D.in Cultural Anthropology from Columbia University.