“CHANGE DIRECTION,” MY instructor slurred, barely able to stay upright.
She was standing in the middle of the ring, shouting directions to us riders while she clutched a huge cup of coffee. “Wrong lead. You’re posting on the wrong leg.” I looked around at the other riders; they were clueless that our teacher was, once again, visibly hungover. That should have been the first indication that I had no business being in that equestrian ring. The second was that my fellow riders were all about nine years old; I was closing in on forty.
I had invested $50,000 in two Andalusian stallions, Spanish horses known for their high, arching necks; gorgeous, flowing manes; high-stepping gait; and calm demeanor. Mine came with a fancy name: Destinado. Destined to change my life.
My significant other at the time and I stabled these expensive horses at the equestrian training center in Burbank, which cost almost as much as the rent on our West Hollywood condo. We paid extra for riders to exercise them daily, of course, and for grooming too—had to keep those manes gleaming!
Next came outfitting the horses and ourselves: saddles, halters, bridles for them and for us, handmade Dehner riding boots and top-of-the-line jodhpurs. Why couldn’t I just put on battered cowboy boots and go on a trail ride?
I was hosting Woman to Woman, employing eighty people in a production company that had my name on the door and the checks; I didn’t have time for such an ill-advised investment of money and time. And when the alcoholic instructor suggested I learn dressage—a series of complicated maneuvers in which rider and horse move in sync—any reasonable woman just learning to ride would have laughed and continued posting on the wrong lead.
But I said, “Why not?” I was a good dancer, I thought foolishly, and had already been told by that same instructor that I was a natural in the saddle: surely, I could learn the Olympic-level moves in a couple of extra lessons.
One morning, I climbed onto the stiff new saddle, half asleep from another long night of preparing for the three Woman to Woman programs I was scheduled to host that day. My expensive stallion sensed my mind wasn’t on him and suddenly began to canter sideways across the ring. I was easily dislodged and fell to the ground.
I woke up in the emergency room as they were cutting off my Dehner boots and protested to the attending physician: “Don’t cut them off! Do you know how much they cost?” What cost more, of course, was the diagnosis. “Looks like you’ve broken your pelvis. We’re sending you for X-rays.”
“But I have three shows to do!” I explained from the nonnegotiating position of flat on my back on a hospital bed. “Guests have been flown in and we have to go live at noon. I have to get to the studio!”
“You won’t be going anywhere today,” the doctor said as he gave me a shot for the pain, which I was just beginning to feel, along with the panic of not being able to move. I can only imagine the panic—and anger—that my producer and partner, Mary Muldoon, experienced when she got the call from the hospital. She’d warned me about doing something as chancy, expensive, time-consuming, and, in her opinion, silly, as learning to ride in the middle of producing a hit series. She didn’t rub it in, and she sent the guests home.
X-rays revealed the pelvis was cracked but not broken, and I was sent home two days later strapped into a special wheelchair designed for lower-body injuries. First challenge: I lived in a small house with twenty-two steps to the front door. I had to be carried up the steps while strapped into that wheelchair. Inside, the chair wouldn’t fit through a single doorway. Carpenters were called and doorframes removed. I needed full-time assistance at home and at the studio. Expenses were piling up and I didn’t even know what my insurance covered.
THE FULL WEIGHT of what this accident meant, physically, financially, emotionally, and professionally, would come to me over the next six months as I returned to the studio, which didn’t have an entrance for a wheelchair. That got fixed quickly with a temporary ramp, but then of course the chair wouldn’t fit into a bathroom stall. The studio responded quickly to accommodate my situation, and every day I got a new appreciation for how many barriers there are for people with physical challenges. At least my situation led to our studio being more accessible to all.
After a month in my wheelchair on set, I got the doctor to agree that I could be transferred in the arms of our production manager to a regular chair, strapped in to keep my lower body immobile. Happily, our living-room set with its sofas and chairs where the guests and I sat in a semicircle accommodated the setup. It was awkward, to say the least, not to be able to move at all from the waist down.
And then there was the challenge of the pain pills, which were necessary for quite some time. Honestly, there were some shows where it took very judicious editing to cover up my mistakes—from forgetting guests’ names to even dropping an expletive or two when a wince of extreme pain followed an inadvertent movement. Not my finest hours on television.
And certainly not my easiest time financially either. Thanks to the extra costs of help at home and in the studio, physical therapy, medications, and the expenses of missed programs, I wasn’t as financially secure as I should have been. I sold the expensive horse (at a great discount) to my trainer, and one year later received a nice photo from her in the winner’s circle—she and Destinado won the regional dressage championship.
I now think of this episode as my “Carrie Bradshaw” Sex and the City moment: Remember the time Carrie can’t muster the $40,000 down payment to buy her Upper West Side brownstone? She later realizes that the row upon row of Manolo Blahniks in her brownstone’s closet is the equivalent of that down payment! “I will literally be the old woman who lived in her shoes,” Carrie moans. At least Carrie had that—shoes to walk and dance in. I could do neither for a long time, and I needed to rethink how I was spending my money.
I was a forty-year-old single mother with a son in college, still renting rather than owning. Making a good salary but with the ever-constant fear that the series could get canceled, I wasn’t financially secure, and I didn’t seek out financial advice. Essentially, I was spending what I made and had no investments beyond the equestrian gear that I ended up giving away.
Consider this chapter a cautionary tale! I believe, as many women who understood far earlier than I did, that the final frontier of feminism is financial independence. If we want to reach our potential as agents in the world, we have to understand the role of money in our lives—its potential power and impact—and use it well. I have no excuses and a lot of regrets when I review this aspect of my life. I could have done better for myself and my son had I made it a priority to learn more about money earlier.
MONEY HAS ALWAYS been a difficult subject for me. As a child, I would watch the unpaid bills pile up and up and up, and not once did my parents ever discuss money with me, except to deny nearly every request to do or buy something: “We can’t afford it.” But no one ever took the time to explain our financial situation. I didn’t have a clue what my father made as an appliance salesman or what Mother made at the local drugstore and later, as a clerk in a women’s clothing store. I would overhear my parents’ raised voices in arguments around how to pay the bills. We weren’t poor; we had enough to eat and a house and a car. But when I started talking about college, it was clear that I’d need a full scholarship to fund such a dream.
I did get a scholarship to the University of Georgia and took out student loans (which I was still paying back well into my thirties), while working part-time at a local clothing store (of course) so I could shop at a discount. Most of my earnings went toward clothes, too. During my three years as an undergraduate and my two years of graduate school, lack of money was baked into my nervous system. Every time a new bill arrived, I’d have a stress attack.
But that didn’t stop my spending. During the years of on-camera work, a lot of money went for trying to find the right look. (It’s a myth that local news people have wardrobe budgets.) I also spent too much buying Mark clothes, which I mistakenly thought might help him fit in. He’d then cut the little logos off his shirts because he didn’t want to look like anyone else! Even as a child, he was a nonconformist.
“You know, you really ought to have a will,” my lawyer in Boston told me.
“But I’m only thirty-five!” I said.
“Well, if something happens to you,” he told me, “Mark will be left a closet full of women’s clothes and not much else.”
My fears about money were a kind of silent shame; I never felt it was something I could talk about, or ask about. I don’t remember one discussion in my consciousness-raising groups or among my feminist friends about who made what, who did what with their money—no talk then about connecting our incomes to our power or our value in the marketplace or our ability to support each other.
Clearly, a few of the leaders of the movement did make the connection and enterprises like Ms. magazine got launched, in part because smart women made the necessary investments and women’s donor funds got started, too, but I confess that this part of the liberation movement hadn’t hit home for me. As a result, I lost time and money—and both are critical to full empowerment and necessary ingredients for becoming a fully realized woman.
I KNOW MANY women with money, and I’ve learned so much by observing how they use their financial resources. I’ve read that more than half of the world’s wealth will be in the hands of women in the next twenty to thirty years. Talk about power and impact!
A few years ago, I attended one of the first meetings of Women Moving Millions, an organization started by sisters Helen LaKelly Hunt and Swanee Hunt to recognize women who give away more than $1 million a year to causes supporting women and girls. I was being interviewed by one of the founding board members and later chair of WMM, my friend Jacki Zehner, about the women’s organizations I was involved in and passionate about supporting.
Later that night, I woke up with a start and asked myself the big question: Why wasn’t I one of the women in the room able to give more generously to causes I care about? Many probably assumed I did have that money—after all, I’d had some pretty high-profile jobs. I’d certainly raised over a million dollars for women and girls and other causes over my lifetime. But I didn’t have the financial security I should have had or the financial acumen to invest or advise other women.
As I’ve moved into leadership positions on boards that govern nonprofits and taken on personal donation commitments, I’ve deeply regretted that I didn’t start earlier both investing and focusing on my potential to be a better manager of money so that I could make a bigger contribution to the work I want to support both financially and with time and talent. It’s a regret I can blame on no one but myself.
MONEY MATTERS, OF course, and to act as if it doesn’t—whether negotiating a salary or reviewing an investment—is leaving more than money on the table. It’s also leaving power and the ability to make change and the possibility of making bold moves just when there’s a greater need than ever for more funds to elevate, leverage, and strengthen solutions to global challenges.
Of course, having money or even giving it away doesn’t necessarily translate to greater impact, or to feeling more freedom or power. Money isn’t an end but a means. Because I’m not ever going to be one who starts her day reviewing her stocks or slavishly following the markets or worrying about the costs of everything I do, I’ve taken some steps to make money less of a stressor and more of a means to invest in what matters.
I’ve hired a financial manager to handle payments and whatever investments of capital made sense. I’ve agreed to a budget with allocations for personal expenses and set aside a percentage no matter my income for donations and contributions because this use of money gives me the greatest satisfaction. I understand that, for many, seeing the ROI on invested capital increase is the joystick, but this isn’t what motivates me. I get quarterly reports to track my spending and investments and most important to me, to determine how much I can give away. It never feels like enough to me.
ONE OF THE ways I have leveraged investing in what matters is through my nonprofit board work. This means supporting V-Day activists and organizations, an annual commitment to the Sundance Institute, and more recently, my board work for the Skoll Foundation as a trustee of the Skoll Fund and the Acumen fund, both of which invest in social entrepreneurs who are innovating new solutions to the world’s biggest problems.
Sitting on those boards, reviewing the work of the enterprising global entrepreneurial community, has opened my eyes to how much still remains to be done to equalize the opportunities for women entrepreneurs to have the same access to capital as their male counterparts. From the beginning in both boardrooms, I heard over and over again how difficult it is to find women entrepreneurs working at scale and who manage to get their enterprises to what investors call the mezzanine level, meaning they have proven they can attract investments for seed funding and early rounds of investments.
This way of assessing who gets foundation funding or capital investments perpetuates the barriers to equal access and equal opportunity that women have experienced across every sector of life and work. It’s the same argument you hear about why there are fewer women in C-suites in business—lack of experience or perhaps sponsorship, meaning someone advocating for them with the same impact as the effective networks among men.
I just don’t buy the scarcity argument or the “hard to find eligible women” excuse… and I certainly don’t accept that in the world of social entrepreneurship, there are fewer women entrepreneurs deserving of funding or capital investment. So I consider it a privilege and a responsibility to keep the gender lens focused when it comes to selecting social entrepreneurs for investment or grants and when it comes to choices about philanthropic giving.
Another aspect of my financial history I’ll share without recommending: I’ve never relied on a man for money. Even when I got married, it never occurred to me that my husband would support me. I worked while pregnant and going to graduate school; I’ve always worked to have my own money. In every relationship with men of varying means, I was always financially independent. To a large extent, I equated financial independence with emotional independence. The downside was that keeping my finances separate, paying my half of everything, helped me avoid important conversations about money.
When a longtime partner and I finally decided to buy a house and live together, I paid half the down payment and half the mortgage every month, and even though I had the right to be on the title as one of the two purchasers of the residence, I never checked to be sure that my name was on it. Years later, when we parted company and I moved to another state, I discovered I had no legal means to force a sale of the property that he had chosen to keep as his residence. I chose not to try the legal options that were open to me, and instead lost the investment I had made over the years with my portion of the mortgage payments.
I was also embarrassed, as I should have been. A forty-year-old woman with her own income and professional accomplishments not knowing she wasn’t on the deed of the house she paid for in equal parts! Here was another painful lesson: there is no glory in being financially independent in a relationship if you’re going to lose money because you don’t like to talk about financial issues or diminish intimacy by cordoning off an important area of all partnerships.
Ironically, I’d always understood budgets because as a producer and running my own production company, I had to allocate funds and balance expenses with revenue. I had to meet payrolls and pay taxes. But investing time and attention to my personal budgets and investments wasn’t a priority—until I moved back to Atlanta.
Shortly into my tenure at Turner Broadcasting, I had another one of those financially opportune moments that turned out to be a game changer. I received a very tempting job offer to become president of ABC daytime entertainment, and it was clearly going to double or even triple my salary at Turner.
Thankfully, Ted’s ultra-competitiveness—and my own intuition—convinced me to stay at Turner when Ted matched the ABC offer and made me a stockholder in TBS, Inc., along with giving me much more responsibility. My TBS, Inc. stock was going to fund my retirement until a certain media merger—the worst in media history, according to many—rendered the stock pretty much useless. However, there’s a better ending to that story that I’ll get to in a few pages.
The point is that it took other people’s serious investment in me, my skills, and my talents for me to take investing in myself as seriously as I should have. Buying a home instead of renting; buying stocks instead of shoes. Asking for a raise even when I didn’t have another job offer because I believed in my own value in the marketplace. All things I should have done earlier and share now in the hopes that money matters will matter sooner for you.
PERHAPS THE MOST important financial shift in my money matters came through my service on corporate boards—something I couldn’t do as a journalist but was allowed to pursue when I became president of PBS. My marketplace had been the media landscape, and then with the boards I was asked to join, I received a global economic education.
Bank of America was the first to approach me to join their board. I thought it was quite ironic that I, whose relationship with banks as a customer was pretty much limited to student loans, would be asked to essentially oversee the finances of a multibillion-dollar company.
I told the CEO, “If I’m going to do this, you’re going to have to get me a financial tutor.”
“Oh, we’ll do that because the first committee you’re on is the audit committee.” Wait, I was now on the audit committee of one of the largest financial institutions in the world? That financial tutor was an enormous help, explaining every line item on the budget and the accounting ledgers: where the money goes, how it’s spent, and how it comes back; lots of complicated financial instruments. Through the next eight years while I was a Bank of America director, the board helped guide major acquisitions and big changes in the business itself, and I moved from audit to compensation to the nominating committee, where I felt my contributions and relevant experiences were most valuable.
I advocated for additional women on the board and more were elected. Colleagues on the board, women as well as men, cautioned me not to play the women’s card—nominating other women directors or paying too much attention to issues regarding gender or equality. I ignored the advice; following it locks in the status quo, and means most corporate boards will be predominantly white men. That’s not good for business… or for customers or for women or people of color. I want all women to play the women’s card or the race card at every opportunity to shift the power dynamic everywhere—especially in boardrooms where more than money matters.
I left the board in early 2008, concerned, like so many, about “bigger is better” and all those subprime mortgages and credit-default swaps. We all know how that story ended.
“YOU’RE DOING WHAT?” Ted Turner yelled into the phone. “You’re going on the board of a company responsible for me losing $2 billion and your losing your entire retirement fund!”
“Well, yes, Ted, I’ve been invited to be a director of the new AOL company, and I believe it’s going to work,” I answered. “You should buy some stock.”
Ted and I… and a whole lot of other people… were losers in the worst media deal in history, as Time magazine called the AOL/Time Warner merger. Ted had asked all of us to hold onto our stock; smart people sold immediately after the deal closed. I dutifully held onto stock that evaporated into nothing. Ted indeed lost $2 billion dollars. I lost a lot less, but for me, it meant a lot more.
So when I got the call several years later from Tim Armstrong, who was now running the new AOL (the old one was essentially absorbed into Time Warner and then spun out as an independent company again), asking me to come see him, I initially hesitated. I had a negative reflex reaction to the name AOL and what it conjured up for me in terms of personal loss. Ultimately, I decided to go because I knew Tim from his days as Google’s president and admired him.
I’d just come back from Kenya where I’d been visiting V-Day activist Agnes Pareyio’s school for girls who were escaping female genital mutilation, a practice in some cultures and communities. Agnes, newly appointed by the Kenyan government to a commission to end the practice in Kenya, is one of the dangerous women who risked alienation and even exile from her Masai community when she started this work. While visiting some villages where the girls had been reunited with their families, I fell forward on some wet stone steps and broke off my four front teeth. (I don’t think this is what my grandmother had in mind when she encouraged me to fall forward!) There were no dentists within reach, so I stayed and continued our work and even went on a safari with Carole Black, V-Day colleague and close friend. We shared a lot of laughs about my appearance, and while not at all comfortable, some of the Masai warriors we met—warriors often pull their own teeth to show courage and signal their status as a warrior—gave me high fives and even danced with me around the fire one evening.
I got a quick fix of the teeth in Nairobi from an Indian dentist who shaped beautiful temporaries, which he warned would last less than a month. The dental restoration was still in progress when I met Tim.
I arrived at the meeting sporting some other funky temporary front teeth and told him the story of losing my real teeth to which he replied, “Anybody brave enough to come to a meeting with those teeth has to be on my board. You clearly show up, no matter what.”
I did show up, as did the other directors Tim invited onto the new AOL board. This ended up being the best board experience of all—in every way. Our group of experienced directors worked well together, and with Tim and his young team, rebuilt the company.
But in today’s media landscape, it’s get big or die, and it became clear after four years that AOL needed to be bigger to compete in the ever-transforming technology space. The decision was made to sell the company to Verizon for a healthy return to shareholders. Maybe Ted didn’t recoup his $2 billion, and for me, at seventy, this was the final opportunity to make a difference in a place where all the decisions matter greatly: not only the ones about money and profits, but also those about culture and gender and corporate responsibility.
And in all those decisions in all boardrooms, women need to be willing to show up and make a difference.
It’s important for more women to be on boards; research has shown conclusively that diversity on boards and in management always produces better results. For example, according to the Harvard School of Public Health, Fortune 500 companies with the highest numbers of women directors on their boards had a 42 percent greater return on sales and a 53 percent higher return on equity than the others. Good governance has been directly linked to the presence of women on boards in terms of better compliance and less corruption and misuse of funds.
In September 2018, then California governor Jerry Brown signed a bill requiring all publicly traded corporations in California to have at least one woman on their board of directors by the end of 2019 as part of a larger effort to narrow the gender gap. By July of 2021, the bill states, at least two women must be on boards with five members, and at least three women on boards with six or more members. The bill might have “potentially fatal legal problems,” Brown says, but “given all the special privileges that corporations have enjoyed for so long, it’s high time corporate boards include the people who constitute more than half the ‘persons’ in America.”
In Norway, where the first quotas were enforced requiring companies working there to have at least 40 percent women on their boards, the initial pushback was significant. “We’ll never find qualified women directors in the eighteen-month time line,” said more than one CEO. But they did find them, and four years later, every company in Norway has at least 40 percent women; research demonstrates that every aspect of business has improved.
Now almost every country in the EU has some form of incentive or quota around representation in boardrooms—but not the United States. “I don’t want quotas,” the young woman attending my forum on board service blurted out after I shared the Norway story. “I don’t want to be forced on some company because the government says it has to have women. I will get there on merit.”
I’ve heard this over and over, and while I’m sympathetic to the “merit, not numbers” defense, I also believe that without quotas or incentives or regulations, the numbers won’t get better. As a famous leader once observed and the current representation in most corporate boardrooms exemplifies, “no one ever gave up power voluntarily.” The power that exists inside corporate boardrooms is significant, and if the opportunity arises to serve on a corporate board, be prepared for consideration.
There are downsides, certainly. It can be challenging to attend all the board meetings (which always exceed the number expected or on the calendar) and to be prepared for the responsibilities that are real and sometimes exceed expectations; and being put up for a shareholder vote every year can be humbling, too. I remember one Bank of America shareholder meeting when a well-known shareholder activist took the mic to demand of the CEO that he “fire the two blondes on his board.” The two blondes were me and Jacki Ward, one of the smartest women I know, and we had just received the highest shareholder votes. All in all, I learned a lot from my corporate-board experiences—about money and the global economy, and a lot about human nature, too.
I’M STILL LEARNING more about how to have a healthy relationship with money. I’m proud of how much money I’ve given to causes about which I’m passionate. But I’m not so proud of how long I waited before paying attention to my own money matters. I don’t want other women to make the same mistakes. I’d advise any woman to hire an investment counselor, someone to sit down and help her plan for savings and investment strategies. If I had the chance to do it again, I would definitely learn more about personal finance and discuss it more. Even now, my closest women friends and I rarely talk about money unless we’re raising money for a cause together.
My mother often said that the way I liked to spend money, I was going to end up as an old woman alone “in the home.” Now those old folks’ homes are called assisted living and my mom ended up in one, alone and with not enough insurance money or savings to pay for her care. Every time I visited her, I thought about the fact that she had worked her entire life, but when my father died, she had no savings, no assets, no credit, and now at the end, she had to rely entirely on my brother and me, who could gratefully afford to pay.
This fear is irrational. I am a white, healthy, and privileged woman, and I am financially secure—not rich by any means, but if I stay on budget, I will have enough. I’m in a marriage that is secure, and while we don’t mingle our finances, we use the same financial advisor, have no money secrets, and share equally in our big expenses. Finally, I feel financially independent and emotionally interdependent, which makes me feel incredibly rich in all the ways that matter.
At seventy-six, I’m still working, sometimes for money as a paid curator or speaker or conference organizer, but I still don’t value my time in terms of money and probably never will. The return on investment for me is knowing that whatever I invest—time, money, information, connections—the value will be measured in change: positive social change, positive personal interactions, and positive experiences that add value to my life and to the lives of others. As I said at the beginning of this chapter, this is a cautionary tale that began with an expensive horse, a big fall, and the forward movement that followed. Becoming a dangerous woman for me means discovering more ways to make my money matter and to advocate for all women to know more about money, to make more money, and when we have it, to be motivated to use it well to open access to what money can mean to others. Money matters for everyone.
DANGEROUS TIMES CALL FOR DANGEROUS WOMEN
In Conversation with Jacqueline Novogratz
As I mentioned earlier in this chapter, I’m proud to serve on the Acumen Board, a nonprofit capital fund that supports entrepreneurs offering products and services for the world’s extremely poor populations. Acumen was the vision of Jacqueline Novogratz, an entrepreneur, author, and former banker. I admire her passion and commitment to changing the way the world thinks about the poor and about money. She is the author of The Blue Sweater: Bridging the Gap Between Rich and Poor in an Interconnected World, based on the moment when she spotted a young boy wearing one of her own sweaters, which her mother had donated to Goodwill years earlier. That put her on a lifelong path to changing the way the world views the poor and the ways we address their needs. Acumen has invested more than $115 million in social enterprises providing products and services to the consumers at the bottom of the economic pyramids in Pakistan, India, East and West Africa, Latin America, and the United States. Her organization also developed and manages KawiSafi Ventures, Ltd, a $70 million off-grid energy impact fund designed to prove that clean off-grid solutions to electricity are the best way to solve energy poverty in Africa. I recently sat down with my good friend Jacqueline to talk about her journey to becoming a dangerous woman.
When and where did your journey to becoming a dangerous woman begin?
Jacqueline: As a young banker, I loved the power of investing in an entrepreneur or idea and seeing the investment translate into jobs or new ways of doing things. What I didn’t love was how the poor were excluded from the banks, often fearing even walking through the bank doors. I left Wall Street and went on to cofound a microfinance bank in Rwanda, learning both the potential and limitations of markets to solve problems of poverty. Yet, when I shared my dream of using philanthropy to back “patient capital” and invest where both markets and government had failed the poor, a number of Wall Street titans said to me, “You obviously don’t understand business.” I was a forty-year-old woman who had already built a bank, yet something gave them permission to question whether I even understood business, let alone what it took to create a business serving people earning just a couple dollars a day in places with limited infrastructure and skills but abundant with bureaucracy and corruption.
You make a connection between business and power and money that many of us don’t make until later. What did you do next?
Jacqueline: Through Acumen, we’ve invested nearly $120 million in companies that have served more than 270 million low-income people. The experience has taught me the potential of redefining investment and the purpose of business, of seeing money simply as a means to doing something else—not as the end in itself. Too many see capitalism as a religion, rather than keeping capital in its place—as a tool to enable us to solve our greatest problems. Markets have extraordinary power—and limitations. At the end of the day, we can’t take money with us. Think of how much would change if we measured success not based on how much money we earned but on how we used that money to release the energies of other human beings?
Too often we think of financial success as the last frontier, our single definition of success. It’s more powerful to control money, to move other people’s money, if you will, toward a greater good. I didn’t have financial assets when I created Acumen; I built it in partnership with a lot of wealthy individuals who made our work possible by giving money and so much more.
What is the connection between money and power that relates specifically to women?
Jacqueline: The question isn’t, “Do we have our own financial security?” because without the freedom and strength to use it, the money is for naught. “Do we have the confidence to put money in its place?” If you have wealth, use it. But wealth isn’t the only means to create change. We all have the chance to make a difference. Like MLK, I dream of a world in which we judge each other by the content of our character, because I’ve learned that just as the word poverty doesn’t tell you anything about a person’s character, neither does the word wealth. I think that’s why I’m so hell-bent on the work that we do for character and moral leadership.
What do you say to other women about the need to embrace our financial power, to become more dangerous in this part of our lives?
Jacqueline: Money, power, technology, information.… If we saw these as tools and not as what defines us, we could create a world in which every one of us were enabled to flourish. That’s where I see a huge opportunity for women. If we could get together and start the conversation about the world we seek to create, then we could take a clear-eyed view of where markets work and whether they fail. Markets are a powerful listening device: people don’t necessarily tell you the truth if you offer them a gift; but they walk with their feet if they have to make decisions about whether to purchase something, even at a highly subsidized price. We also must understand the role of government, which has a responsibility to care for the most vulnerable, and the role of philanthropy as a de-risking mechanism, to enable intrepid individuals to build solutions to poverty. We can solve our biggest problems. What gets in our way is power unbridled, pushed by ego, and the rest of the world bowing to it. They’re false idols.
How do we get to this world where the power of money and power of women come together for positive change?
Jacqueline: We need a new moral framework that measures success not by how the wealthy are treated, but how the poor, the vulnerable of the earth fare. A framework that recognizes that we are not only part of each other, we are each other. I exist because you exist. If we dare to get close enough to see each other, then it becomes impossible to exploit each other. It becomes impossible for us to live in a world where my winning necessarily implies your losing, but rather one where I can only have the full dignity of what it means to be a human being if I afford that full dignity to you and every other person on the planet.