Tina Brown, award-winning journalist and former editor of Vanity Fair and the New Yorker, has some career advice for women: rather than try to squeeze yourself into a patriarchal type of workplace, start your own thing.
“I know so many women who are starting their own businesses, and I think they’re doing it because then they can then design a culture that suits them better,” said Brown, who joined Yahoo Finance’s On the Move ahead of the Women in the World Summit, which she founded 10 years ago to highlight the work of global leaders.
Among the women scheduled to participate in next week’s summit in New York are Susan Rice, Brie Larson, Oprah Winfrey, and Anna Wintour. One common characteristic shared by all of them, said Brown: tenacity.
“They have tenacity and they are tough,” Brown said. “What I find very appealing about all the women who come to our stage, is that they bring this human side which is a multi-dimensional approach to leadership. It’s not just sort of barking orders, it’s not just sort of swinging the Alpha-ness around. It isn’t that. It’s actually about listening well. They’re all women who know how to listen and therefore they know how to lead.”
Powerful women leaders
While there are a handful of well-known powerful female leaders currently making their mark on the world such as Pelosi, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, and New Zealand’s prime minister Jacinda Ardern, Brown says that the path to being a woman leader is a tough road where “very often women have to sort of battle through being marginalized and minimized.”
When it comes to Brexit, an issue she feels strongly about, Brown has both harsh and sympathetic words for the woman at the center of the debacle. Theresa May “has been a completely inept prime minister,” Brown said, but added in May’s defense: “I resent the fact that [she] was put in this position by the feckless behavior of those upper-class men in the [David] Cameron administration, in the Tory administration, who just simply blundered this referendum without any kind of plan for Brexit and now look where we are.” (More than two years after the 2016 vote for Britain to leave the European Union, the British parliament has been unable to decide on the terms for Britain’s withdrawal from the European Union, rejecting Prime Minister Theresa May’s plan for the third time.)
A powerful leader who has earned Brown’s praise is Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi. “She knows how to put the tangerine toddler, as I call him, in his basket. She kicks him to the curb,” Brown said, referring to President Trump, who Pelosi publicly tussled with over his demands for border wall money last year.
Brown describes Pelosi’s leadership style as one that entails rallying her caucus like a mother hen, using a combination of tough love, time-outs, treats and meetings. It’s a particular leadership approach Brown wants to celebrate at the Women in the World summit.
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