Phyllis A. James, president and CEO of Las Vegas’ Foundation for Women’s Leadership and Empowerment, is a portrait of what’s possible.

Raised in a Black middle-class neighborhood in Washington, D.C., James excelled in education during a time when schools around the country were being desegregated in the wake of Brown v. Board of Education. “It was a great time,” she says, “but it was a turbulent time in a lot of places.”

That drive landed her at Harvard Radcliffe and then Harvard Law School, where she graduated and became a corporate lawyer. James went on to do impactful work, serving as the chief lawyer for the City of Detroit and the chief diversity and corporate responsibility officer for MGM Resorts for 17 years. She grew accustomed to being a leading force in those circles, but often as the only Black woman.

“I never met a woman business president in my whole career until I was about 50 years old,” she says. But through her nonprofit, and its 16th annual Women’s Leadership Conference, James is determined to change that. The conference, held September 18-19, gathered prominent female leaders— including Las Vegas Raiders President Sandra Morgan — to share how women can move into the driver’s seat of success.

The Weekly spoke with James about her personal journey, why role models that look like you matter and more.

Becoming a corporate lawyer played such a defining role in your leadership story. What made you want to pursue law in the first place? I was an avid fan of [the ’50s-’60s TV series] Perry Mason when I was growing up (laughs). That character on television is where I drew inspiration from. I found the character to be so impressive because of his erudition and his confidence, and I thought, “Gee, I’d like to be like that one day and always have the answers.”

Personally, there were no lawyers in my family. I didn’t know any lawyers, except I did have one “brush with law.” There was a woman who was living with a family I knew, and she was a student at Howard University Law School in D.C. They were doing a mock trial and needed a witness, who was a young girl. I played the role, and that was really my first exposure [to law]. That was fascinating to me.

Even after Brown V. Board of Education, you still had to fight for the quality of your education. What was that like? I tell people, I am a child of affirmative action, which was just a few months ago reversed by the U.S. Supreme Court, which I thoroughly disagree with. It’s not as though anybody lowered standards to accept me as a student. But when I went to Harvard University and Harvard Law School, they were simply, affirmatively, reaching out to include diverse people in their classrooms and in their institutions for all of the right reasons. I think the reversal by the Supreme Court is for all of the wrong reasons.

But the thing that caught my attention in law school is there were very few lawyers of color in the corporate arena. Most lawyers at the time were very much confined to their communities of color. They either did civil rights work or they did public defender type work or criminal defense law or family law. The corporate arena, which is the most lucrative sphere of law, was virtually lily white and virtually all male. Most people in my class at Harvard Law School were joining corporate firms. So I thought, “Why do I have to be a legal aid lawyer or a criminal defense lawyer?” It’s not that I knock those things. There’s a desperate need for those kinds of lawyers. But I was attracted to the corporate arena and decided, I’m not going to accept that I can’t do that.

How important is mentorship in a situation like that? There’s a commercial on TV for a company that uses this slogan, “If you see it, you can be it.” That matters a great deal. To be able to see somebody like yourself in a particular role is extremely important. When I was in college, the woman at Harvard Law School that I tagged around with was a Black woman like myself, who later became one of the first federal judges appointed in New York City. At the time, neither she nor I knew that’s what she would become, but she made a big impression on me. That’s such an important part of the dimension of our conference, to expose women to highly accomplished women so that they go, “I could be that if I apply myself.”

How did the foundation and conference grow into what it is now? [The foundation] was formed in mid 2019, and it grew out of the Women’s Leadership Conference. The conference started while I was at MGM Resorts in 2007 as a result of a collaboration between our corporate diversity group and a group of diverse community leaders who were women here in Las Vegas. They represented the Urban Chamber of Commerce, the Latin Chamber of Commerce, the Asian American Chamber of Commerce and, later, the Women’s Chamber of Commerce. And they very much felt the absence of an organized forum or platform for the development and growth of women here in this community.

When I left MGM Resorts in 2019, my purpose in setting up this foundation was to not only to continue the Women’s Leadership Conference, but to try to expand it and make the mission a broader cross country endeavor to promote and develop women leaders.

We have so many progressive equality efforts in place right now with diversity, equity and inclusion departments in major companies. Why are we still struggling to see more women at the top? Although some segments of our society have become more progressive in their thinking about equality of women and roles for women, there is still a strong sub rosa lingering attitude, that women don’t belong in leadership positions, that they are not suitable for leadership. …

The other huge stumbling block to women is the lack of affordable childcare that’s equitably distributed in our society. I think that if we broke that institutional barrier, we would see a lot more progress a lot more quickly.

There are also institutional barriers in the way recruiting systems, standards for evaluating candidates and standards for promotion are set up. But I do think at an individual level, there are other things at work when it comes to specific individual women. There is a documented aspirational gap between men and women.

Men seem to aspire more to be leaders than women, and part of that’s because they’re inundated with examples of male role models. Women don’t have the same level of exposure. Therefore, women don’t develop the same self-confidence about whether or not they can become leaders, because they don’t see women in leadership as much.

How can men support more women leaders? Our programs are open to men as well as women, because leadership skills are not restricted to any gender. We don’t want to be discriminatory, and we also want male leaders to come and feel what it’s like to be surrounded by a sea of women leaders. That’s important.

Men need to understand that women are aspiring and ascending to leadership roles, and part of being successful is knowing how to be a team player, and a leader with people who are different from you. … It’s extremely important that leaders … make sure that their hiring policies, promotional policies and development policies are implemented in a fair and inclusive way, so nobody gets left behind, so that women have as much access, and people of color have as much access, to promotional opportunities and developmental opportunities.

As a leader yourself, what’s the most rewarding part of this? When I was growing up, I never really thought of myself as a role model. I was always looking for role models; I wasn’t trying to be one. But if I have helped anybody else move ahead, along their journey of development, and how they define success for themselves, then I would say I’ve done a lot. That’s hugely satisfying for me.

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