Women Rule

She was the first woman to lead a diplomatic mission in Saudi Arabia. She was the U.S. ambassador to Malta. Now, Gina Abercrombie-Winstanley is trying to open up the diplomatic world to more women and people of color.

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In the 2018 elections, the number of GOP women in the House dropped to its lowest number in 25 years. That’s where Rebecca Schuller comes in: Her newly formed super PAC is aimed at increasing the number of Republican women in Congress.

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How do you get to be one of the most powerful women in the tech world by the time you're in your mid-30s? Maher is the head of the Wikimedia Foundation, the group that runs the fifth most popular website in the world: Wikipedia. She joins to talk about women in tech, fake news and what she discovered when she became a boss.

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She went from being a paralegal and receptionist to a CEO, self-made billionaire and member of the president’s cabinet. Linda McMahon, the former CEO of WWE, former head of the Small Business Administration and current chair of America First Action — a super PAC dedicated to supporting Donald Trump’s 2020 campaign — shares what she learned along the way.

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Before joining Congress, Houlahan served in the Air Force, led a major sporting-goods company, taught high-school chemistry, and was a non-profit executive. She shares what she’s learned along the way — and how she became comfortable taking on totally new challenges, time and again.

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Refinery29 co-founder and executive creative director Piera Gelardi on what she’s learned as a former art-school student who became a heavy hitter in the online publishing world — including how she got comfortable asking questions in business meetings, managing a work-life balance when you work with your husband and growing up in a family business.

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Katie Sturino, the founder of Megababe and blogger behind “The 12ish Style,” opens up about pushing the fashion industry to become more size-inclusive.

It is, by now, folk wisdom on the Internet: Never read the comments beneath a news article. They can be filled with sexism, racism, cruel mockery and ad hominem attacks. Avoid them at all costs — especially if the article is about you, or you’re a woman, or you don’t fit a very narrow range of acceptable body types.

Katie Sturino ignored that advice. She doesn’t regret it. In fact, she credits it with inspiring her “a-ha” moment.

Four years ago, after being the subject of an article about personal style and “how to get dressed as a curvy woman,” Sturino took in readers’ reactions and was surprised by what she saw.

“I read the comments of women, and they said, ‘Oh, my god, I’ve never seen my body on a fashion blog.’ ‘Oh, my god, I’m a size 14, and I didn’t think I could wear shorts,” Sturino said in an interview for POLITICO’s Women Rule podcast. “It was this thing where I realized that it was my job, this was — I was being called to this.”

Since that realization, Sturino has become the serial entrepreneur behind a small style empire that focuses on the women who are often ignored by the fashion industry.

“I think that there’s this misconception with designers, where you’ve got 12 people sitting around a boardroom, none of them are over a size six, and they’re like, ‘We’re dressing all women,’” said Sturino. “That is how they think.”

Sturino wants them to think again.

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As editor-in-chief of the Bustle Digital Group, Kate Ward oversees some of the web's most popular news outlets, including Romper, Elite Daily, and Mic — pretty amazing for a company that started out of a Brooklyn apartment. Ward shares what she's learned in the journey from start-up to major success — including why Bustle gives its employees a financial stake in the company.

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Since founding Framebridge in 2014, Susan Tynan has raised more than $67 million in funding for her company. How did she do it? By learning at every step of the way and learning to trust her own instincts.

Anna sat down with Susan on stage to talk about the specific lessons she's learned from launching her own startup, how to get over the hump in starting your own business, and what it's like to be a professional woman pitching mostly wealthy, white, male investors.

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The name Anna Wintour immediately calls to mind an image of a woman at once both cool and cold, her face framed by an perfect bob haircut, her eyes inscrutable, hidden behind oversized sunglasses. You imagine the mind behind those glasses — the mind behind VOGUE, the woman whose hard-charging leadership style was the basis for Meryl Streep’s titular character in “The Devil Wears Prada.”

But if you’re able to escape the gravitational pull of that image, you’ll find something else: A model of how women can lead, and a cautionary tale of the double-standards they face once they do.

“They’re caricatures, they’re stereotypes,” said Amy Astley in an interview for POLITICO’s Women Rule podcast. “This is a businessperson successfully running a business. It’s not easy. And some of those things that were heaped upon her, you don’t see it heaped upon men as much.”

Astley is the editor-in-chief of Architectural Digest and a longtime Wintour protege who has led AD through something of a renaissance — dramatically expanding its digital business, launching new products and rejuvenating the century-old magazine’s brand.

Working in the world of style and fashion journalism, Astley sees her role as reflecting on the culture and illuminating why certain things are important to society. And that makes politics an unavoidable topic — even if you’re not intentionally being political.

“I had Ricky Martin on the cover [of AD] with his husband and his two kids … in their house in LA. They were barefoot, casual. I didn’t really give it two thoughts because to me, they’re just a fabulous couple — beautiful family, great house,” said Astley. “I had a lot of letters thanking me for just presenting them as a gay couple without putting any politics around it or pointing it out in any way, and it didn’t really occur to me that we would single them out in any way; to me, they were a family. That’s political.”

She came to the job after 13 years as Teen Vogue’s founding editor-in-chief — a position she was hand-picked for after a decade spent at its parent publication, Vogue. Astley credits her success at the top of the publishing world to the lessons she learned from Wintour’s example.

“Anna is not only the hardcore businesswoman, but she is a person who works all the time … and I have tried to bring that to all my jobs,” said Astley. “You see that she’s in it with you working really, really hard. We all know of bosses who, like, don’t really come to work. And it’s not a positive.”

“I really learned watching her be relentless: Keep trying things; do new things. Don’t worry if people say negative things about you. If something fails, carry on,” said Astley.

For Astley, one of those “new things” was launching Teen Vogue in 2003 with a decidedly different perspective than other publications aimed at girls and young women.

“My thinking was feminist, to be honest. I wanted the magazine to be about the life and the well-being of the young woman,” said Astley. “It wasn’t about how to kiss or … silly quizzes or how to dress to attract boys. I didn’t want any of that. I didn’t want it to be about how you are in relation to men; how you attract them, how you make them happy, how you please them. [That’s] so dated, but that is still what teen magazines were largely doing at that point.

Young women responded, and the magazine quickly became one of the most-circulated in the publishing world and blazed a path for the rush of woman-positive media that followed — which Astley credits to the generation of people who followed her and “were able to deepen and continue that work.”

In that way, Astley herself became a model for young women pursuing leadership, much as Wintour was for her.

“I know what my staff thinks about me and they know what I think about them. I think they’re the best, and I support them and I feel that comes back to me, and that’s why I’ve had a good career and have been able to make good products,” said Astley. “My team that I built, they know that I’m working hand-in-hand with them, and they know that I respect them and care about them. … It’s that simple. Respect, it all comes to respect.”

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