Amy Williams
Our thirty-first member of the month is Amy Williams
UCRF is running a ‘Member of the Month’ feature on this blog, where a member, selected at random from the membership database, is sent five questions to give us all an overview of our members. Our thirty-first participant, Amy Williams, is a fashion educator and researcher working at the intersection of fashion sustainability, organizational leadership, and gender equity, with a focus on the systemic barriers shaping women’s roles in the industry.
—1 How would you sum up your research/practice?
My research and practice are grounded in social practice and systems change, particularly addressing power imbalances for women in society and the workplace. At the University of Southern California, where I teach in the Master of Sustainability Management program, I developed and teach the course Transforming Organizational Leadership for Sustainability, which explores leadership through an equity and sustainability lens.
— 2 How do you address fashion and sustainability in your work?
My foundation in fashion design serves as the experiential anchor of my work. Having trained in New York and worked extensively in global manufacturing for American, Canadian, and Japanese markets, I gained firsthand exposure to the unsustainable and inequitable practices embedded in global production. These experiences shape the core of my current teaching and research—using the “why” behind these practices to illuminate both the necessity and the possibility of change.
— 3 What are the conflicts you have encountered around fashion and sustainability in your work?
One major barrier I’ve encountered in advancing sustainability within fashion is institutional denial. Before the Rana Plaza disaster, the U.S. trade association largely dismissed sustainability as a fringe concern—a West Coast trend irrelevant to mainstream operations. This refusal to reassess growth models or governance standards kept the industry trapped in cycles of cost-driven efficiency rather than purpose-driven sufficiency. I believe it’s critical now to reorient business decision-making toward sufficiency, responsibility, and mindful resource use.
— 4 What do you consider the key sources and cases when it comes to fashion and sustainability?
My work also examines gender imbalance in leadership within the fashion industry, questioning why so few women hold decision-making positions, despite representing much of the global fashion workforce. Reports from Marie Claire, The New York Times (Eric Wilson), and studies by Glamour and McKinsey with the CFDA have periodically spotlighted this issue, but public discourse fades quickly. My research continues where those stories left off—investigating how bias, suppression, and systemic barriers push women out of traditional fashion roles, even as they emerge as leaders in sustainable business and nonprofit initiatives. And my dissertation preview: Sustainable Fashion: The Female Phenomenon.
— 5 Could you recommend some less-known sources or cases you think should be more widely shared?
Moving forward, I advocate for deeper financial analysis as a crucial, under-discussed area. The economic frameworks dictating scale and production volumes perpetuate both unsustainable practices and gendered inequities. By scrutinizing where funding flows—from trade organizations to brand foundations—and who controls those resources, we can better understand why sustainability progress remains uneven and why women founders face disproportionate challenges in accessing capital for change.
Part of my research has focused on the barriers for women, linking to surveys from McKinseys Women in Workplace annual studies including this one highlighting the rollback on female leadership support and education:
Thank you Amy for sharing your work!
