When you joined Fortune magazine in 2000, describe the culture you encountered.
I was really lucky to get that job straight out of college. I was assigned to work for an experienced editor at large, so I had a built-in mentorship situation, which was amazing. Before long I did notice that the younger reporters were pretty balanced in terms of male and female, but when it came to senior editors, there were very few women.
One of my dear male friends started at Fortune around the same time as me, and I saw him being invited to play tennis with our senior editors and going out for drinks afterward. He had all of these natural opportunities to pitch stories to our bosses, while I stayed late at the office figuring out how to read SEC filings. None of this was malicious — there was just this ‘sorting’ of the work culture into two groups: the people the executives wanted to hang out with, and those they didn’t.
How did this setting affect your
