5 Women at the Heart of the Jewelry World

“The world is so large, but it gets smaller every day with all the people I meet,” said Ms. Gong, 27.

“Ultimately we’re people specialists, that’s how I like to see it,” she said. “We establish trusting relationships with our clients, and we end up being the touch point for all their needs, cross-category.” In her case, she works as a specialist in gems and as an appraiser, with Uniform Standard of Professional Appraisal Practice credentials, and also handles private sales.

Ms. Gong was born in Seattle, moved with her family to Beijing when she was 6, then returned to the United States for high school. As a girl, she was drawn to the arms-and-armor collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. “Even if it wasn’t considered jewelry, my first love in metal crafts was a wearable piece of metal, tied to the function of the body,” she said.

She graduated from Pratt Institute in New York City with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree and studied at Musashino University in Tokyo, where she apprenticed with the Japanese silver master Hiroshi Suzuki. She also backpacked around the world, learning about gem mining in Myanmar, the emerald trade in Colombia and gemstone-cutting in Thailand. “Even if I didn’t dedicate decades to it,” she said, the experience gave her “a better firsthand understanding of the process in order to speak about it with more authority to my clients.”

Before starting her job at Sotheby’s in early 2019, Ms. Gong worked as a private jewelry consultant and dealer, where she became acquainted with jewelry pricing and market movement, topics that she said helped her now. “Primarily it’s a market geared towards a female consumer, yet the people who control the other side of the industry are, in the majority, men,” she said. “There’s a disconnect with those on top and the product presented to the consumer, a lack of a dialogue. But hopefully in the future there will be more female executives, dealers and designers.”