Redirecting.work

Her work consistently exposed her to structural workplace inequality, prompting a long-standing focus on discrimination, bullying, harassment, and gender imbalance, well before the emergence of modern DEI frameworks as we know them today.

 

The shift to solo entrepreneurship and her second pivot came with geography and family: a move to Brussels, her kids changing schools, and the recognition that her work needed to be self-directed. Combining her HR and sales skills she wanted presence, agency, and alignment with values, not just revenue. Belgium’s high taxation on independents made every decision she made intentional.

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During the financial crisis, she formally integrated coaching and training into her professional practice and later founded 3Plus International. dedicated to advancing gender balance and addressing sexism and sexual harassment in the workplace.

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Told she didn’t “fit” prescribed leadership molds, Dorothy developed a sharper lens on power. While the early 2000s used different languages for diversity and inclusion, they did not yet transform daily behavior. She experienced the disconnect directly: organizations forced to follow statutory regulations in theory while ignoring the harassment, bullying, and pay disparities their own systems protected. Corporate culture still rewarded “bro norms,” and women, especially women over 45, were both invisible and over-scrutinized.

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The financial crisis brought a surge of demand for coaching, and Dorothy formalized that pathway. Doing cognitive behavioral coaching helped her support individuals facing bias without internalizing it. As she widened her practice from advising and executive search, she learned that DEI was not just a framework, but a calling. Prejudice in hiring, coded language in job posts, and algorithmic visibility gaps were no longer abstractions; she could see them, track them, and quantify them.

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Current Direction

Dorothy is known now for two things: fearless clarity about inequity and a refusal to cede psychological space to those who benefit from her silence. Her work spans algorithmic, organizational, and cultural bias. When she tested gender-coded language on LinkedIn, engagement patterns spiked and collapsed along predictable lines. When she posts about harassment or workplace inequity, her reach drops. When she posts Tom Hiddleston, the system amplifies her. The data tells a story she has lived for 30 years: women can be seen, but often only on terms platforms deem pleasant, decorative, or non-threatening. 

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Dorothy is part of a global grassroots movement challenging that architecture (#FairnessInTheFeed). She is pushing LinkedIn for transparency, contributing to petitions, and participating in European forums such as the European Women’s Management Development Forum on content suppression. She has watched women in their 50s pushed out of workplaces while men with less performance and more misconduct remain protected. She has seen credibility discounted while online harassment is normalized. And she has seen the rise of “reverse ageism,” in which younger talent is excluded for lacking 10–15 years of experience by age 30.

She speaks not from outrage but from documentation. Bias is measurable, and she measures it.

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“Claim Your Credit” is her philosophy and practice. Women are socialized to downplay competence. Platforms reward that downplaying with temporary visibility and punish assertive expertise with silence. Dorothy helps women name their achievements in résumés, in leadership, in compensation, and in online spaces engineered to mute them.

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Her spirituality is subtle but steady: rooted in nature, quiet presence, and the recalibration COVID forced across lives and identities. She knows the body remembers what the mind tolerates. She knows resilience is less personality than practice.

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Advice to Others

Dorothy teaches what she has lived: 

• Take up space without apology. 

• Delegate what is not yours to master. 

• Partner when partnership accelerates capacity. 

• Learn something uncomfortable—she learned French, not because it was easy, but because it was essential. 

• Do not believe platforms when they treat you as decoration. 

• Do not believe organizations when they credit you for change but deny you authority to make it.

• Be open to starting over and learning continuously. Her key message to those making pivots is “be willing and humble to start from the bottom and open to constant, continuous learning while responding to circumstances.”

 

Women, she argues, are not short of talent. They are short of visibility that is not mediated by algorithms trained on male normativity.

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To those pivoting at 30, 50, or 70—she offers this: You are not late. You are not done. You are arriving at the point where you see clearly, and seeing clearly makes silence impossible. 

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The work ahead for Dorothy is not martyrdom but design: claiming credit, naming systems, and refusing disappearance.

Dorothy has spent her career helping others stand up. Now, with more yesterdays than tomorrows, she stands without shrinking, flinching, or yielding to a culture more comfortable when she is quiet.