Women Rule

She's the most powerful woman in America: Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi. At the Women Rule Summit, she sat down with Anna to talk about the impeachment of President Donald Trump, her decades-long effort to get more women elected to Congress, and why simply having a seat at the table isn’t enough.

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Lolwah Al-Khater is the face of Qatari diplomacy. She’s also an introvert with a fear of public speaking, and the first woman ever to hold her position. We talked about how she manages all that — on top of the formidable portfolio of issues she deals with every day in the Middle East.

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She flew 89 combat missions in Iraq and Afghanistan. She was the first woman in the Marine Corps to fly an F-18 in a combat mission. Now, she’s home in Kentucky, hoping to beat the odds and bring down the most powerful man in the Senate. But to do that, Amy McGrath will need to convince a great many Trump-supporting Kentuckians to cross over and support her, too.

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Amy Howe, the president and COO of Ticketmaster North America, joins Anna Palmer to discuss the “obligation to dissent” that makes her speak up in meetings, what her years as a business consultant taught her about being a successful manager and boss, and how we might be getting that whole “work-life balance” thing all wrong.

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MJ Hegar doesn’t back down from a fight — whether in combat in Afghanistan, or pushing the Pentagon to revise old sexist rules, or being denied a meeting with her member of Congress, or running for U.S. Senate as a Democrat in deep-red Texas.

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You know Susan Rice as President Obama's national security adviser and UN ambassador. But there's a lot about her you don't know — like the time Donald Trump hugged her and said she was treated unfairly about Benghazi; or the moment she, as a young Clinton administration official, flipped off Richard Holbrooke; or her time helping lead America's foreign policy despite being a 32-year-old with a baby on her hip; or what it was like having a dad who grew up in segregated South Carolina, and whose daughter was few black kids growing up in Washington DC's most elite schools. 

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A year after the death of her husband, Sen. John McCain, Cindy McCain joins us to talk about the value of civility, her struggle to be taken seriously as a woman in Washington, and the side of her that you probably don't know — ranging from her time as special education teacher working with the children of migrant farmworkers, to the critical role Jill and Joe Biden played at the start of John and Cindy's relationship.

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It's an important skill to have. Just ask Jamie Jones Miller. She was a college athlete, then worked as a lobbyist before a career on Capitol Hill, where she rose to become a chief of staff. Now, as the top lobbyist for the Defense Department, she has to walk a fine line — being strong and forceful but also empathetic and congenial.

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When you conjure up an image of a c-suite executive, you probably don’t envision a smiling, friendly person. At first, Kate Lewis didn’t either.

And that was a problem as Lewis started taking on jobs in the publishing world with greater and greater responsibilities: By nature, she has a smiling, friendly disposition. But she didn’t see very many people like that in the corridors of power.

“In the magazine industry, there are a lot of—there’s an image, right, that you need to be a high-fashion person, that you need to have been a journalist in the trenches,” said Lewis, the chief content officer for Hearst Magazines. As a young, ambitious woman, she emulated them—thinking doing so was key to her thriving in the notoriously fast-paced New York publishing world.

Instead, she had a realization that changed everything: What if being herself—that smiling, friendly person—actually made her a better leader?

“I found my success when I became who I am. And that’s hard,” Lewis said during an interview for POLITICO’s Women Rule podcast. “I became comfortable with just being Kate. And that enabled me to have more candid, more deep, more real conversations with the people who were either going to hire me or were going to manage me or who I was going to work with. And I think that has made me more successful.”

At Hearst, Lewis oversees some of the most enduring and recognized magazines in America, including Cosmopolitan, Country Living, Good Housekeeping, Elle, Marie Claire, Popular Mechanics, Harper’s Bazaar and Elle, to name a few.

“Even though wisdom may be, you know, not to be the goofball, and to … not openly question yourself or open yourself up for debate, I think that has worked out really well for me,” Lewis said. “I think it’s coupled with the fact that I am decisive, and when I see the path, I go after it, and that I am capable of being critical, and all those things.”

“To me, that is the best strategy,” said Lewis: “Just be yourself and trust that that’s enough.”

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She started out as an intern and worked her way up to become the president of entertainment and chief marketing officer of Univision. But before all that, she was a girl growing up in the Bronx — the eldest daughter of two Spanish-speaking immigrants, which gave her a foot in two worlds. As a kid, she had to translate for her parents — especially after her father died suddenly when she was just 15. She says those responsibilities coming at such an early age are common — and where others simply see hurdles, she also sees the start of her trajectory as a business leader.

Now, Jessica Rodriguez is one of the most powerful Latinas in media. And she wants to help make the c-suite more diverse — which means, in part, making people see their own strengths.

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