Lady Business: Pregnant CEOs and 100 Female Founders
Hello and welcome to Lady Business, a weekly newsletter about women, the business world, and all the ways they overlap. You can sign up for Lady Business and read previous issues here. This is the 81st issue, published September 19, 2019.
Serena & Rihanna & Audrey & Hillary
As I previewed in last week’s newsletter, on Monday my magazine unveiled the package that ate my summer: Inc.’s second annual Female Founders 100 list of the most innovative and ambitious women in business.
It’s a pretty great list, if I do say so myself! It includes celebrities like Serena Williams and Rihanna, who made history this year as the first woman to launch a fashion house for luxury conglomerate LVMH; well-established entrepreneurs like Jazzercise’s Judi Sheppard Missett, who started her iconic fitness empire in 1969, and D’Artagnan’s Ariane Daguin, who cofounded her influential organic-meat company in 1985; the current generation of well-funded startup founders, like Zola’s Shan-Lyn Ma and Tala’s Shivani Siroya and Fetch Robotics’ Melonee Wise; and many lesser-known entrepreneurs with ambitious ideas, like Sevetri Wilson, founder of nonprofit-focused software developer Resilia, and Dawn Song, a UCBerkeley computer scientist who founded consumer-privacy-focused, blockchain-based Oasis Labs.
And I have to say I’ve been gratified by the response:
Thank you @inc! Honored to be amongst incredible #FemaleFounders in 2019. https://t.co/Jkc6awggCX pic.twitter.com/80QFJHW3bF
— Serena Williams (@serenawilliams) September 17, 2019
The whole list is worth some time spent browsing, especially because Inc.’s digital team designed a gorgeous interactive graphic and online presentation of the package. That was the last, big step of a months-long process involving most of my colleagues, because, as I alluded to last week, putting together a package of 100 people is pretty complicated!
Especially when the criteria are, generally, so broad. This is the flipside of the challenges that I mentioned last week: Lists of exclusively public-company CEOs can have the mostly-white-men problems that Forbes ran headlong into this month. Lists of exclusively private-company founders, of which I’ve worked on many for Inc., can mean you’re working with far less financial data about the actual health or performance of the companies, since most startups don’t disclose revenue or profitability numbers. (And gobs of venture money raised, often the only number these companies are willing to disclose, is … not always a great proxy for financial health or, yaknow, sensible business practices. As the slow implosion of the WeWork IPO is amply demonstrating!)
For the 2019 Female Founders 100 list, we considered women running both private and public companies, with the main criteria being that they had founded a business and that they had done something particularly innovative and ambitious within the past year. Which -- good news/bad news alert -- means my colleagues and I had far, far, far more than 100 great candidates to choose among.
That’s where the other organizing principle of the list came in: What industries or sectors are women entrepreneurs shaping? I mean, all of them, yes, but: How did we want to group those industries, and the women within them? What were the biggest stories we wanted to tell about how women are making a difference in business in 2019?
So the final package uses my profile of Daguin to highlight several newcomers who are following her lead in changing our food system; commissioned some terrific photos of Siroya and Honeybee’s Ennie Lim and other women who are expanding consumer access to tradition-bound, male-dominated financial and insurance and engineering services; and, as you may have seen yesterday, uses Christine Lagorio-Chafkin’s cover story about The Wing and co-founder Audrey Gelman to examine the recent boom in by-women-for-women professional spaces.
And the ways in which many of these founders are changing what CEOs look like in public:
As the Today Show and others covered, this is the first time a mainstream business publication has put a visibly pregnant CEO on its cover (and, as Jessica Pressler pointed out yesterday, one of the only times anyone’s put a visibly pregnant and clothed woman on a cover). “You can’t be what you can’t see,” as Gelman told Today about her decision to pose for our cover.
So, speaking of being gratified by the response, it’s been really exciting to see how much this photo means to many different women – and to see the level of attention it’s drawn to some important work that I’m happy and proud to have been a part of at Inc.:
We shouldn't have had to wait until 2019 for this first, but I'm glad we're here. Go, @AudreyGelman, go! https://t.co/CGzxrJr0kT
— Hillary Clinton (@HillaryClinton) September 18, 2019
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