While her professional accomplishments were extraordinary, what really stuck out to me in her talk was her discussion of the culture of each company where she worked and the struggle to have a family in the beauty industry. Her candor, honesty, and recognition of her own behavior and mistakes, as well as those around her, was inspiring.
When I worked in the arts, literally all the senior women were either never married or divorced and on the whole childless. My mentor, the COO of the New Museum was frank with me when she left: working at the museum was more taxing than working in venture capital. My direct boss was married to her job and the artists she worked with. My young female colleagues and I discusses how we could be successful amid this environment that seemed to require that sort of commitment.
Elana's story does not seem that different, though she's about 10 years my senior. None of her colleagues have children. She hid her first pregnancy as long as possible, worked late the night before she gave birth, and then was on a business trip to Europe 13 weeks after giving birth. She admits she thinks this is crazy now but it's what she needed to prove herself and do her job. She was candid about the difficulties of being the sole mother in a sea of women without families.
There are stories about how the founder of the New Museum used to have her children around her regularly, bringing them on business trips and to openings. It's a nice image, and I love the chutzpah that took in an industry where the single male curator is (believe it or not) still the mental model of ideal.
Strangely, there are far more women with families in consulting. I don't quite know what to make of this now--I don't have a family and I do have ambitions in a difficult industry--but it was just so good, and so important, to hear a senior woman be honest about her experience.
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