Oct 29

Oct 29 When Women Lead: What They Achieve, Why They Succeed, and How We Can Learn from Them

Author: Julia Boorstin
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Goodreads | The StoryGraph

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Note: Content and trigger warnings are provided for those who need them at the bottom of this page. If you don’t need them and don’t want to risk spoilers, don’t scroll past the full review.

Cover Description

A groundbreaking, deeply reported work from CNBC’s Julia Boorstin that reveals the key commonalities and characteristics that help top female leaders thrive as they innovate, grow businesses, and navigate crises—an essential resource for anyone in the workplace.

Julia Boorstin was thirteen when her mother told her that, by the time she grew up, women could be just as powerful as men, “captains of industry, running the biggest companies!” A decade later, working at a top business publication and seeing the dearth of women in positions of leadership, Boorstin assumed her mom had been wrong. But over the following two decades as a TV reporter and creator of CNBC’s Disruptor 50 franchise, interviewing, and studying thousands of executives, she realized that a gender-equity utopia shouldn’t be a pipe dream. Yes, women faced massive social and institutional headwinds, and struggled with double standards and what psychologists call “pattern matching.” Yet those who thrived, Boorstin found, shared key commonalities that made them uniquely equipped to lead, grow businesses, and navigate crises. They were highly adaptive to change, deeply empathetic in their management style, and much more likely to integrate diverse points of view into their business strategies, filling voids that their male counterparts had overlooked for generations. By utilizing those strengths, they had invented new business models, disrupted industries, and made massive profits along the way.

Now, in When Women Lead, Boorstin brings together the stories of over sixty of those female CEOs and leaders, and dozens of new studies. Her combination of narrative and research reveals how once-underestimated characteristics, from vulnerability and gratitude to divergent thinking, can be vital superpowers—and that anyone can work these approaches to their advantage. Featuring new interviews with Katrina Lake, Gwyneth Paltrow, Jenn Hyman, Whitney Wolfe Herd, Lena Waithe, Shivani Siroya, Julia Collins, and more, When Women Lead is a radical blueprint for the future of business, and our world at large.

TL;DR Review

When Women Lead is an interesting, hopeful look at what happens when women run companies, from better business results to the existence of more businesses that meet women’s needs.

For you if: You’re looking for some inspirational business stories mixed with hard data.

Full Review

Thank you, Avid Reader Press, for the advanced copy of When Women Lead! Full disclosure: I work at a company led by one of the women CEOs profiled in this book, but that has no impact on my review and my opinions here are 100% my own.

When Women Lead is part data, part stories, all women. It not only highlights the fact that women founders and CEOs tend to post better business results — despite something like 2% of venture capital dollars — but offers plenty of case studies to help explain why. Boorstin introduces us to so many women leaders in the book, and they each have inspiration and wisdom to offer. She then loops in plenty of cold, hard facts and data to underscore and legitimize the common threads.

While I’m not sure I’m QUITE so optimistic as Boorstin that these trends will inevitably tip the scales, I did appreciate the hope she offered. I also loved hearing more about how all the sausage got made at some of these major brands (Bumble, Rent the Runway, The RealReal, Goop, etc.). The interview style of these chapters was great for the subject matter, and Boorstin weaves them together in a way that feels natural, engaging, and enlightening.