Isabel Fernandez-Mateo has spent her career probing one of the corporate world’s most enduring puzzles: why, despite decades of effort, the upper echelons of business remain stubbornly homogeneous. As Professor of Strategy and Entrepreneurship at London Business School, her research dissects the hidden mechanisms of hiring, promotion and executive search that shape who gets ahead-and who is left behind. In this instalment of “Five Minutes with the Faculty,” Fernandez-Mateo reflects on the data behind gender inequality, the myths that still dominate conversations about talent, and how organisations can move from well-meaning rhetoric to measurable change.
Academic journey at London Business School and the making of a leading organisational scholar
Arriving in Regent’s Park as a young economist, Isabel swapped the elegance of theory for the messy realities of careers, power and organisational life. Her early days at the School were spent poring over anonymised CVs and promotion files, tracing how tiny decisions – a word in a reference letter, a gap in a career timeline – accumulated into systematic inequalities. Surrounded by a faculty that encouraged intellectual risk-taking, she pivoted from traditional labor economics to a more investigative, field-based approach, embedding herself in executive search firms and corporate HR departments. That proximity to practice allowed her to transform abstract questions about gender and advancement into rigorously documented patterns that firms could no longer ignore.
Over time, the classroom became a laboratory where research and teaching constantly cross-pollinated. Executive participants arrived with real hiring dilemmas and left with a sharper lens on bias and structural barriers; their stories in turn reshaped Isabel’s empirical questions. This virtuous loop helped her emerge as a reference voice on careers and inequality in global organisations. Today, her work is not only cited in top journals but also used in boardroom discussions and policy debates. Colleagues describe her contribution as a blend of forensic data analysis and grounded empathy – a combination that has positioned her at the forefront of organisational scholarship.
- Discipline: Organisational behaviour & labour markets
- Research focus: Careers,inequality,executive search
- Approach: Data-driven,field-based,practitioner-engaged
| Milestone | Impact at LBS |
|---|---|
| First field study with headhunters | Opened a window into hidden hiring practices |
| Launch of gender and careers projects | Informed diversity strategies for global firms |
| Integration into executive programmes | Brought cutting-edge research into board-level decisions |
Inside her research on gender,careers and inequality in professional labour markets
From elite law firms to global consultancies,Isabel Fernandez-Mateo follows the critical career junctions where talent is filtered,promoted or quietly sidelined. Her work traces how seemingly neutral processes – from headhunter shortlists to partnership votes – systematically disadvantage women and other underrepresented groups, even in organisations that proudly champion meritocracy. By analysing anonymised hiring data, confidential promotion records and in-depth executive interviews, she uncovers the subtle mechanisms through which bias is reproduced: who gets the “stretch” assignment, whose performance is framed as potential, and who is judged on proven track record alone.
Rather than focusing only on individual choices, she interrogates the architecture of professional labour markets and how status, risk and reward are distributed. Her current projects examine how career interruptions and non-linear trajectories are penalised, and why women are less likely to be channelled into the most lucrative, high-prestige roles. Drawing on these insights, her research highlights concrete levers for change:
- Restructuring promotion criteria to reduce reliance on opaque “fit” judgments
- Redesigning search and referral practices that tend to recycle the same kinds of candidates
- Reframing high-risk assignments so they are not allocated along gendered assumptions about ambition or availability
| Focus Area | Key Question |
|---|---|
| Executive hiring | Who makes it onto the shortlist? |
| Partnership tracks | How is “readiness” defined and by whom? |
| Career breaks | Why are non-linear paths still penalised? |
How her findings can help organisations design fairer hiring and promotion practices
Fernandez-Mateo’s research gives leaders a practical playbook for stripping bias out of talent decisions without sacrificing performance. By mapping how gender, social class and networks quietly skew access to opportunities long before final interviews, she pushes organisations to examine the “hidden funnel” – who gets sourced, referred, and fast-tracked in the first place. Her work suggests firms should interrogate the data trail at each gate, from headhunter shortlists to internal nominations, and redesign processes so that criteria are explicit, comparable and consistently applied. This can involve simple but powerful moves, such as anonymised CV screening in early rounds, calibrated scoring rubrics, and structured feedback loops that make decision-making visible rather than subjective and opaque.
Translating these insights into everyday practice means treating fairness as a design challenge, not a slogan.HR teams and line managers can use her findings to pilot evidence-based interventions such as:
- Network-aware sourcing – widening search channels beyond traditional schools, firms and social circles.
- Obvious promotion “playbooks” – clearly spelling out what progression looks like, with examples and timelines.
- Bias-check points – scheduled reviews of shortlists, performance ratings and pay decisions by diverse panels.
- Accountability dashboards – regular reporting of progression rates across gender, ethnicity and class background.
| Challenge | Insight from research | Design response |
|---|---|---|
| Unequal access to stretch roles | Opportunities flow through informal networks | Open internal marketplaces for projects |
| Subjective promotion panels | Unstructured debates reward confidence over competence | Structured criteria and written justifications |
| Leaky leadership pipelines | Bias accumulates at every small decision | Regular audits of decisions along the career path |
Practical advice for students and executives seeking purposeful and inclusive careers
Whether you are mapping your first internship or pivoting from the C-suite, start by interrogating your own definition of success.Replace the vague ambition to “make an impact” with two concrete anchors: who you want to serve and what kind of inequality you refuse to reproduce. From there, curate your choices with intent: seek roles where performance is measured transparently, leaders are held accountable for diversity metrics and progression pathways are visible rather than whispered. In interviews, treat culture as data: ask how promotions are decided, who sits on key committees and how often flexible work requests are granted – and to whom.
- Students: rotate across functions and geographies, but keep a learning diary that tracks which environments allow you to speak up, fail safely and be seen beyond your CV.
- Executives: use your bargaining power to negotiate not just salary, but inclusive practices – from diverse hiring slates to sponsorship schemes tied to your bonus.
- Everyone: cultivate “small acts of power” – the candidates you recommend, the meetings you chair, the voices you amplify – as daily instruments of fairness.
| Career Move | Purpose Check | Inclusion Check |
|---|---|---|
| New role | Does it solve a problem I care about? | Will I work with a genuinely diverse team? |
| New project | Can I learn skills with social relevance? | Who might be unintentionally excluded? |
| New employer | Are values backed by measurable action? | Is leadership diversity improving over time? |
Purposeful, inclusive careers rarely emerge from one heroic decision; they are assembled through a disciplined pattern of questions like these, asked repeatedly at every inflection point. Over time, this habit not only shapes your trajectory but also quietly shifts the opportunity structure for those who follow.
Final Thoughts
As Fernandez-Mateo returns to the classroom and her research, her reflections serve as a reminder that academic work does not unfold in isolation, but in constant dialog with industry, policy and society at large.In five minutes, she offers a snapshot of a career spent interrogating how organisations make decisions about talent-and what that means for the people whose lives are shaped by those choices.
At London Business School,that perspective continues to inform not only the questions she asks in her research,but the way she challenges students to see power,opportunity and fairness with a more critical eye. If this brief conversation reveals anything, it is that the real impact of her work lies not just in the data she analyses, but in the minds she helps to change.
