Cathy Engelbert Quotes

The executive female talent gap is real, and that's why it's critical to champion women throughout their careers.

I'm probably a little bit of an outlier for women because I don't believe that you have to self-promote to get where you're going.

The glass ceiling will go away when women help other women break through that ceiling.

We need to create a society where girls and women are getting the same encouragement and support to build their careers as the boys and men are. From the start.

Sponsorship involves putting your own political capital at risk, so they are going to help that person to succeed. Women get promoted; they don't get sponsored. Women know they are on their own if they get that promotion.

There's only two things that I really care about - apart from family - one is business and the other is women in business.

We say women have made great strides: in biology, in many areas of chemistry, in many places, women are now the majority of medical students. But when I began my career, that wasn't the case. There were very strong stereotypes in biology and medicine.

When a very tough, old school leader announced that I was his pick to be Chief of Station in a small but important frontier post, a few competitors complained to me directly 'why would they send you?' I owe that leader much for believing in me at a time when few women were given these opportunities.

I don't have the advocates. I don't have a good old boys network. Part of what I want to do is to create a good old girls network.

The old boy network is still very strong and very true. Just look at the stock exchange and how many men and women are there. It is still very much run by men.

Being part of a team helped me so much. I know the fact that there was a man in the room with me all those years made the medicine go down. I had made the companies money. I didn't have to start, like a lot of women, from ground zero. My path was not the same as a woman starting out by herself.

I don't think women are better than men, I think men are a lot worse than women.

Every company I know is looking for more women at the table. Every board is looking for more women at the table. There's a reason why men want to understand the challenges women face, address them, because then they're going to be better hirers, attracters and retainers of women.

It's so hard for women in this business. And I want to be doing this when I'm 50.

My hope in writing 'Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead' was to change the conversation from what women can't do to what we can.

There's still prejudice and that resistance regarding women, not only on female football but in various activities. Men think that women are a bit fragile to perform some types of activities or don't have the ability and aren't strong enough.

I used to think that the worst form of discrimination for women was being hit on or hearing something disparaging. What's even more challenging for young women is a very senior male who will take an interest in you, who see themselves as father figures or mentors.

Girls like Diana Spencer, armed with nothing more than a guinea-pig-rearing certificate, proud to say in that old Sloane way that she was 'as thick as two short planks,' became the exception as girls from Benenden and Downe House started to fast-track towards the City and law, consultancy, media and the arts.

I got the role I loved the most at a point in my career when most women are being phased out.

The term 'glass ceiling' was coined in 1984. More than 20 years later, the ceiling has barely cracked. There isn't a single country in the world that has as many female as male politicians. In business, the situation is even worse. Its highest echelon - the board - remains a chauvinist's dream.

The only way the gender divide affected me was the social things the younger guy executives could do with their bosses. I don't know what went on in the clubs, because I didn't go. I made sure my work was stellar, and that compensated for whatever social time we weren't spending together.

All my best friends are women except for one or two. I feel women are superior to men, and I love having them around. All that female energy is good for me.

When I started Donna Karan, people weren't really accepting the idea of the working woman.

In television, women can really run anything. It can be a comedy, it can be a drama, it can be genre, it can be anything. But in films, women are still getting to the top.

Mentorship has been an excuse not to promote women.