Being a woman in control of a company - even a small private company, as ours was then - was so singular and surprising in those days that I necessarily stood out. In 1963, and for the first several years of my working life, my situation was certainly unique.
When I started, there were very few women at the managing director level and very few who had families, which is something that was important to me. So it's not like, when I looked up, I could say, 'Well, that's who I want to be.'
Not only do the majority of senior women executives have sports in their background, they recognize that the behaviors and techniques learned through sports are critical to motivating teams and improving performance in a corporate environment.
I find it fascinating that sport has such a strong connection to success in business. Arguably, C-suite women are some of the most successful women, and more than half of them played at a more advanced level than just the general population of women in business that had sport in their background.
At this moment in history, millions of 'working dads' are desiring to do what they do not feel they have the right to do: be more devoted as a dad, less devoted as a worker. This feeling is far more ubiquitous among men executives than women executives in many areas of the world because, for instance, Asia-Pacific women executives today are more than six times as likely to not have children than men executives are. The Asia-Pacific executive man is about six times as likely to be a working dad as an executive woman is to be a working mom.
When I started, there very few women at the managing director level and very few who had families, which is something that was important to me. So it's not like when I looked up I could say, 'Well, that's who I want to be.'
It's funny, there are so many women who are former executives and have taken all that stress and anxiety and transferred it onto their kids.
It is always great to see technology leaders like Ginni Rometty, Marissa Mayer, and Meg Whitman breaking through as a new generation of leaders.
I want 'Vogue' to be pacy, sharp, and sexy - I'm not interested in the super-rich or infinitely leisured. I want our readers to be energetic executive women, with money of their own and a wide range of interests. There is a new kind of woman out there. She's interested in business and money.
