Ellevate Chair Sally Krawcheck speaking at the Raymond James Women's Symposium
Last night, AOL's much-hyped "Makers" documentary premiered on PBS. It was an hour-long look at the past 60 years of women in business, a mashup of interviews with everyone from Facebook's Sheryl Sandberg to Xerox's Ursula Burns, Ogilvy & Mather's Shelly Lazarus to HP's Meg Whitman.
Needless to say, it was an impressive group. And they all had a lot to say about their personal experiences, as well as the progress of women in business in this country over the past six decades.
In case your TV was not tuned to PBS last night, here are nine memorable quotes from some of history's leading women in business, past and present:
"I don't have the kind of a life that I suppose a lot of women would prefer to have, but I have a very thrilling life and I wouldn't trade it for anybody's."
— Mary Wells, an advertising icon in the 1950s and '60s, in an interview with Barbara Walters. After Wells was denied the top job at Jack Tinker & Partners in New York, she launched her own agency — to great success.
"I'm the wash-and-wear type."
— Anne Hopkins on why she was denied a promotion to partner at PricewaterhouseCoopers in the early 1980s: She just wasn't "womanly" enough. Hopkins fought PwC in court for seven years — and won. She eventually ran one of the most diverse and profitable teams in the firm.
"If I was dealing with a trader, every other word had to be a four-letter word."
— Muriel Siebert, on being a woman in the very masculine world of Wall Street. Siebert changed firms three or four times because she wasn't getting paid as much as her male colleagues. Eventually, she decided to work for herself and became the first woman ever to buy a seat on the New York Stock Exchange.
