Gladys Carrion

As a practicing lawyer in the 1970s, Gladys Carrión was many times mistaken for a caseworker or a social worker when she entered the courtroom.

“People would address their questions to the men I was with, when in fact I was their supervisor,” Carrión said.

In those years, Carrión faced the triple barrier of being young, female and a person of color, but she said her gender was the most significant.

“As I progressed in my career, I always felt that I had to be better than my peers and colleagues,” she said. “And not because there were high expectations.”

In fact, the expectations were very low. When Carrión was acting as general counsel to a state agency some years ago, she worked with a male commissioner who expressed his satisfaction with her performance in a revealing veiled insult.

“He told me, ‘I didn’t think you would be smart,’ ” Carrión said.

When Eliot Spitzer became governor in 2007, Carrión took the reins at OCFS, managing an agency of 4,000 employees and a budget of around $4 billion.

“It has been one big challenge,” she said. “We serve children and families when they’re in crisis, so we deal with some very difficult, difficult issues—with very limited resources.”

And the agency hasn’t always served children and families effectively, Carrión said. For that reason, her leadership has involved reevaluating some of the methods and practices at OCFS. “Change has been a constant in this agency,” Carrión said. “We are always reengineering.”

How did you get your start? When Mayor Dinkins was elected, he was the first to have transition committees interview his prospective appointees. I was interviewed for commissioner of what was then the community-development association, and the mayor offered me the position.

On balance, has being a woman helped or hurt?
As a lawyer, I faced a lot of discrimination for it. In my current job, I don’t think that being a woman has been an issue at all. It has never been as much of a problem in the nonprofit sector as in other industries. And also, we’ve come a ways.

What is the worst advice anyone ever gave you?
The worst advice was more of a leading-by-example situation. I once had a really bad supervisor, to whom I was the deputy. She was a screamer and a yeller. I was able to observe her and realize that wasn’t the way I wanted to work with people. It was a good opportunity to see what not to do.

The post Gladys Carrion appeared first on City & State.