Successful ascent of female leaders in the pharmaceutical industry: a qualitative, transcendental, and phenomenological study

Dawn Adams–Harmon holds a doctorate degree in Management/Organizational Leadership, an MBA and a BS in marketing/psychology. She is the CEO of EBW Healthcare Consultants which is a firm that provides coaching and consulting and conducts qualitative studies for firms interested in providing support for minorities and women interested in ascending in the healthcare sector. She is also a professor of Leadership and Management at Kean University’s College of Business and Public Management (MMIB). Her research results inspired the creation of the 360-Degree Gender Sphere which is a theory that describes the encapsulating barriers women experience in health care and displaces the Glass Ceiling nomenclature. Her firm conducts workshops that guide participants through these barriers and conveys the strategies these female executives used to ascend. The 360-Degree Gender Sphere and the Six Success Strategies to Create Resilience; Awareness, Assessment, and Action planning workshops have been delivered to domestic and international audiences. Dr. Adams–Harmon has worked for over 30 years in the healthcare industry, hiring, training and developing six sales teams at Pfizer, Schering-Plough and Merck, and held positions as a training manager and Director of Leadership Development at Pfizer and other companies. Her future research interests include looking at the intersectionality of gender and race and studying the impact of the six success strategies on female ascendance in STEM. Dr. Adams–Harmon has been married for 30 years and has two children. Her hobbies include skiing and dance, and she is an outdoor enthusiast.

Nancy Greer–Williams, PhD, MPH, PCPH. Dr Nancy Greer–Williams is a mixed-methods/qualitative/quantitative methods expert who has engaged with hundreds of individuals from communities that are traditionally underrepresented in research. Her specific academic scholarship foci areas include social determinants of health and global populations, community-based participatory interventions and graduate level student support programs. Dr Greer–Williams research has included a study of lifestyle management techniques employed by rural women with breast cancer in Arkansas; utilizing community based participatory research to identify and address health inequities among African Americans, Hispanics, Hmongs, Marshallese and Impoverished White adults and families; conducting six focus group interviews with African Caribbean women in the United Kingdom; conducting an intervention to train lay community members in urban/rural parts of Arkansas to serve as community health workers; and conducting exploratory, mixed methods design with five, rural ethnic populations regarding their use and knowledge of the Affordable Care Insurance. In addition, she has contributed to diversification of the health workforce through offering student support programming to increase the numbers of minority students who pursue and achieve doctoral degrees. In addition to earning a PhD in Higher Administration from Western Michigan University and Master’s degrees in both Organizational Communications Public Health, she completed a 3-year post-doctoral fellowship with a concentration on Health Disparities at the University of Wisconsin–Madison home to some of themost challenging material child health disparities in the nation. The fellowship entailed studying the complex relationship of obesity and metabolic syndrome and its effect on breast cancer mortality in rural African-American women.