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Wednesday's Woman: Career-Defining Moments

Posted by Gayle Kesten Wednesday, Nov 12, 2008, 03:01 PM ET

Mere weeks before I graduated from college with an advertising degree, I was wandering around the campus bookstore when a paperback about careers in publishing caught my eye. Though still to this day prone to talk myself out of most any purchase, I went ahead and bought it anyway.

That book cast my favorite part about advertising -- the words -- in a new light. Speed up nearly two decades, and literally every position I've held has been as either an editor or writer for a magazine, newspaper, or Web site.

That unsolicited trip down memory lane is courtesy of The Wall Street Journal's 50 Women to Watch 2008 special report, which looks at the leading female players in Corporate USA. Women like FDIC chairman Sheila Bair (No. 1 on the WSJ's list), Yahoo president Susan Decker, Facebook COO Sheryl, GE SVP Pamela Daley, and Delta Airlines SVP Joanne Smith. The women represent a cross-section of industries and nationalities, and are 50 of the 18 million cracks in the glass ceiling that N.Y. Sen. Hillary Clinton referred to in her concession speech in June.

Because I'm always interested in people's back stories -- how they arrived at where they are -- I was intrigued by an accompanying article that asked a handful of the profiled women about the key turning point, decision, or career move that changed everything for them. Clearly that's what got me thinking about my little bookstore story. But enough about me!

  • Janet Yellen, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco: "In 1994, I received a call from a member of President Clinton's economic team asking if I would be interested in serving as a governor of the Federal Reserve. Up to that time, my career had been almost entirely academic. It was a shift for me in the sense that I was moving from research to policy, and it gave me a chance to expand my expertise into new areas."

  • Laura Tyson, member of President-elect Barack Obama's Transition Economic Advisory Board and professor, Haas School of Business: "Probably the key decision was to apply to MIT [Massachusetts Institute of Technology] -- the only economics Ph.D. program I applied to. It was relatively late in my senior year of college. I loved economics, but I'd been thinking about getting a master's degree in public affairs. So I applied to one program, and once I was admitted I really had to make a decision because I had other options. I got advice from everyone that I should definitely get the Ph.D. in economics. It's the kind of degree where every road will be open to you. From that point on, it was staying with it."

  • Peggy Whitson, NASA astronaut and first woman to command a space station mission: "Seeing Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walk on the moon definitely played a role in my interest in exploration and space. Who wouldn't want that job? But I was only 9 at the time, and there are many things that 9-years olds dream about...As I was graduating high school, I read about the first astronaut selection that included females. This was when the goal of becoming an astronaut took real shape for me, even though I had no idea the difficulties or challenges involved in this process."

  • Michele Davis, Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs and Director of Policy Planning, U.S. Treasury: "If I had to pick a single turning point, it would be in my early 20s, right after graduate school, when I was working at a small policy think tank. I had finished everything but my dissertation for my Ph.D. in economics, and I was pretty much a policy wonk with little interest in politics. But working in a think tank made very clear to me that writing long academic policy papers only reaches a small, mostly like-minded, audience. I was drawn to the challenge of trying to communicate policy ideas to a broader audience."

  • Mary Ellen Iskenderian, president of Women's World Banking: "I went to Lehman Brothers right out of business school, where I had an extraordinary on-the-job education in finance. But when I was working there, I was putting in very, very long hours and it became increasingly clear that if I was devoting that kind of time and energy to something, it should be something that was more aligned with my values...After that, I really decided to devote my career and professional energy to poverty alleviation."

    What about you? Please share with us the moment that changed the course of your career in the Comments area below.

    Recent Wednesday's Woman articles:


    The Wednesday's Woman series is written for today's community of hard-working, small-business women, featuring profiles, industry trends, research, work/life balance issues and other topics of interest. Send your ideas to Gayle Kesten.

    Women in Business




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