Closing the Corporate Gender Gap

FIELD TRIP: Students in the first program cohort join staff from the Berkeley Center for Law and Business and Google during a visit to Google’s headquarters last year.

Angeli Patel ’20 had read about it, heard about it, and talked about it. But as a young attorney, seeing firsthand the gulf between women and men in corporate workplace settings — from empowerment to confidence to leadership roles — was particularly maddening.

When she became executive director of the Berkeley Center for Law and Business (BCLB) in January 2023, Patel set out to confront that by creating the Women in Business Law Emerging Leaders Program.

“I wanted to intercept this gap early in the law school experience and show women students that they belong in the business world just as much as anyone else — and they can shape it,” Patel says.

Berkeley Law’s competitive program selected 18 students in its first cohort last year and 19 this year. Students develop their networks and career strategy through site visits to major companies such as Google and Lyft, discussions with general counsels, events with top firms, coaching sessions, resume reviews, networking receptions, and more.

Johnsenia Brooks ’26, who co-founded a social events curation brand before law school, eagerly applied to the program. She praises how it fosters community, connects students with opportunities in the larger business law field, and instills more confidence to pursue them.

“It was the perfect chance for me to learn firsthand from companies whose products I use in my everyday life,” she says. “I was really excited at the fact that the Emerging Leaders Program is for women and led by women. You become more confident getting to talk to boss women and learning how they’ve navigated their careers.”

Patel and BCLB Program Coordinator Lenique Frazier tailor workshops to help students learn how to make the most of their first year, prepare them for exams, teach them to effectively use LinkedIn and other networking tools, and highlight how best to interact with business law professionals.

They work to forge a community foundation and build on it with pragmatic programming that illuminates the vocabulary of business professionals, brings them into corporate spaces to help them visualize their futures there, and teaches them about business law’s “soft skills.”

“A disproportionate amount of women take themselves out of the running in these spaces simply because they don’t feel qualified enough, compared to men who will often shoot their shot even with minimal qualifications,” Patel says. “This is a symptom of what I call a confidence gap that can only be solved through empowerment and mindset shift.”

Alejandra Zamora ’26, who worked exclusively in the public sector before law school, joined the program to learn more about business law. She’s now considering pursuing an in-house attorney position at a company.

“The Emerging Leaders Program opened my eyes to new opportunities and spaces that I would not have envisioned myself in before,” Zamora says. “We need more programs like this because we need to build community and seek mentorship from successful women.”

Going forward, Patel hopes to expand the initiative’s reach — from resources to cohort sizes to collaborations with more area companies.

“For us, success is when students realize they are the masters of their own fate and creators of their own future,” she says. — Andrew Cohen