Sarah Kaplan

Sarah Kaplan

University of Toronto Distinguished Professor of Gender and the Economy

Professor of Strategic Management

Director, Institute for Gender + the Economy

Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto

Sarah Kaplan is Professor of Strategic Management and Director of the Institute for Gender and the Economy at the Rotman School. The Institute seeks to uncover business, career and investment opportunities in finance, management, entrepreneurship and the economy by promoting gender analysis in research and education.

Kaplan is author of the New York Times business bestseller, "Creative Destruction", challenging the notion of sustainable competitive advantage and the myth of excellence and "Survive and Thrive: Winning Against Strategic Threats to Your Business" The research shows that long-established companies, instead of maintaining excellence, almost always under-perform the market over time. Ironically, the very culture and meticulously maintained systems that fuel the good times cause companies to stall out.

Her academic research continues this exploration of how organizations participate in and respond to the emergence of new fields and technologies. Her studies examine the biotechnology, fiber optics, financial services, nanotechnology and most recently, the field emerging at the nexus of gender and finance. Her interest in gender and the economy is in understanding how whole new ecosystems can be built. She recently authored “The Risky Rhetoric of Female Risk Aversion” (2016) in the Stanford Social Innovation Review, “Meritocracy: From Myth to Reality” in the Rotman Magazine (2015), “The Rise of Gender Capitalism,” in the Stanford Social Innovation Review (2014) and is currently studying the role innovation accelerators can play in changing outcomes for women entrepreneurs.

Formerly a professor at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania (where she remains a Senior Fellow), and a consultant and innovation specialist for nearly a decade at McKinsey & Company in New York, she completed her doctoral research at the Sloan School of Management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).