[2] In her 40+ year career as a Special Assistant to the President and Chancellor of Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Rowe became a model for the role of ombud.

[6] In her professional and research interests, Rowe considers kinds of power in interpersonal negotiations and how to understand and address issues of harassment, dispute resolution and unacceptable behavior.

[5][7][8] As an ombuds at MIT, Rowe has worked with people at all levels to develop techniques for dealing with reports of sexual harassment and all other workplace issues.

[6] Rowe and others recommend the intentional practice of using micro-affirmations to communicate that people are "welcome, visible, and capable" and improve academic and workplace culture for everyone involved.

She was initially empowered by then-president Jerome B. Wiesner and then-Chancellor Paul E. Gray[3] to be an independent neutral party[6] who would respond to anyone who came to her with concerns, in an impartial and confidential manner.

He charged her: “Don’t let any problem happen twice.”[3] Rowe coined the term “zero-barrier office” to describe the desired position of an ombuds within an institution.

[6] She worked with individual "visitors" to her office to develop options of their own choice for dealing with difficult situations and with good ideas that had not yet gotten traction.

For example, a compliance officer could be prompted to do a routine, unannounced “spot check”, or a senior manager could discuss policies relating to an issue generally at a routine staff meeting [18][19] One of Rowe's techniques, "Drafting a Letter", involves drafting a private letter to a perceived offender, factually describing what had happened, their emotions relating to the incident, and a proposed remedy.

[21][3] Rowe started the first (private and hidden)listserv for ombuds, enabling individuals at different institutions to share advice and develop new conflict management and intervention techniques.

Rowe helped to develop techniques for dealing with reports of all kinds of harassment[9] well before the federal government established the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission guidelines in 1980.

[27] Rowe added the idea of micro-inequities to earlier seminal work by Dr. Chester Pierce about micro-aggressions, in order to include additional concerns which are perceived to be unfair.

Micro-affirmations are subtle or "apparently small acts, which are often ephemeral and hard-to-see, events that are public and private, often unconscious but very effective, which occur wherever people wish to help others to succeed.

The perception that a bystander would intervene was highly important to physicians who experienced incidents of being "mistreated, harassed, or intimidated" by patients and visitors during the COVID-19 pandemic.