Eleanor's Letter: What I learnt chairing seven panels over International Women's Day 2023

The Rise of the Queenager IWD panel at Fora on Tuesday: from left, Caroline Rush (CEO of the British Fashion Council) Sarah Pittendrigh (Entrepreneur of the Year, author), Eleanor Mills, Gail Porter, Priya Oberoi (Founder Goddess Gaia Ventures) Katrina Larkin (co-founder of Fora). It was so wonderful to see so many of you in the audience!

Dear Queenagers

So it’s been quite the week! I’ve done seven events for International Women’s Day in four days – have to confess that I got to a point of such knackeration that I was good for nothing but mindlessly watching This Is Us and chopping vegetables. But now that my brain has partially recovered, this is what I’ve learnt!

My first foray was to Eve Pollard’s swanky lunch at Daphne’s in South Kensington, very Lady Di, filled with top female hacks. There was lots of gossip about my old colleague Isabelle Oakeshott particularly why she gave the whatsapps to the Telegraph not News Uk (where she works on their TV channel as International Editor) and whether or not she should have broken her NDA to Hancock. The general view was that the Whatsapps were in the national interest (and certainly in her’s!) but the real scandal that they revealed was the lack of women in the political room; very few female voices explaining how lockdowns were impacting kids, or mums because of the home schooling, or most scandalously the elderly left to die alone with no contact with loved ones…

We all had to offer our bit on how we help women succeed. I talked about the massive mentoring campaign we launched at Women In Journalism (I was Chair from 2014-2021, Eve Founded it 30 years ago) and how that had tangibly helped women into jobs by pairing those on the way up with top industry talent. A couple of ladies said they were more worried now about men…  (hmm – when women hold 92 of the FTSE 100 top jobs maybe we’ll talk).  The brilliant Rosemary Panter, only woman ever to be Entrepreneur of the Year, and the only woman to own and run a huge Theatre group said women’s progress is patchy eg there has never been a female head of the National Theatre. While Claudia Winkleman (Eve’s daughter) demurred saying the whole of TV is run by women (there are apparently no men on Strictly) and that ITV, Channel 4 and BBC1 all have women at the helm (not that that seems to change the pressure on women to stay looking young on TV – the ladies on our screens eg Amanda Holden, or indeed the wonderful Winkleman, all look rather different from the rest of us!)

From South Ken I took the tube (weighed down by chocolates and Noon mugs for my panellists) to Fora in Folgate Street  where I moderated an online discussion for US Communications company Zeno Group.

The Zeno panel

My speakers included a professional female basketball player Monique, who was in Turkey, a Rhodes Scholar medic Nicole in Oxford (pioneering mentoring for young women of colour to become doctors) Christina, a Chinese American who is head of Comms for bio-tech firm Regeneron in Chicago, and Claudia the head of Sustainability Globally for Lenovo who was in Mexico. I loved the Global perspective. Sounds like South America is still finding working mums a challenge, while few Chinese American women go into C-Suite roles.  We talked about how naming the kind of microaggressions women face is so helpful in calling them out – taking in everything from Mansplaining to Adulting. (Adulting, Monique said, is how black teenagers and children are often punished more harshly than white kids for the same misdemeanours because they are seen through a grown up lens. While Weathering also afflicts women of colour who often have to overcome the twin barriers of racism and poverty which take a toll on their health and energy.) I told them about #queenagers and about how much things have changed in the last three decades being highlighted for me by my daughter last weekend: she fought for Oxford against Cambridge in Kick Boxing – sparring, kicking, punching – the full Rocky, in a ring with bound hands and everything. I’ve never in my life been put in a position where I had to fight someone. I don’t know any other women who have either. I am incredibly proud of my daughter (who won I am pleased to say) – and I also reckon it will stand her in amazingly good stead in the future. I was just thinking of the confidence it must bring. All those times I’ve gone on Good Morning Britain or other live media to have a gladiatorial debate would have been made way easier by some real sparring experience; not to mention Editor’s conference at the Sunday Times! Hooray for the next generation – also reflected in the athleticism and female sports star power of Monique in basketball. She talked about the schism she’d felt growing up between being a tom boy ‘who threw hoop’ with the basketball boys, but also wanting to be feminine and elegant. She’s now written a book about how to be both. The world turns. The way that female sport is now being taken seriously (I was also lucky enough to see the Lionesses talk last week) is evidence of inspirational and proper change.

Tuesday’s third panel was my own. Queenagers: A Force to be Reckoned With. A Noon/Fora production for International Women’s Day (Fora runs super swanky rentable work spaces).

Its co-founder Katrina Larkin is a Queenager (in her earlier life she ran and created the Big Chill festival). It’s funny how we end up where we began: I spent incredibly happy times in the 90s raving at Big Chill, huge silver bean bags, Norman Jay spinning the tunes on Sunday morning, hosts of friends… Good Times at the Larmer Tree Gardens in Dorset… but I digress. Queenagers:Katrina talked about growing in confidence and power in her 50s, feeling full of ideas and future projects. Caroline Rush (head of the British Fashion Council) focussed on the huge consumer power of Queenagers (outspending millennials by 250%) and about the 50 something super models taking the catwalks by storm in London and Paris in 2023. Sarah Pittendrigh talked of her life as an entrepreneur, how money and success will never fill the holes in the soul - that has to be done by doing the work on ourselves, and particularly by us coming to terms with our own limiting beliefs (she is great at that, she told me to start monetising this email on Substack, she was right!) TV star Gail Porter (who has just joined our Noon Advisory Board) talked about the wisdom that comes from having survived, how Queenagers really are Forged in Fire, referencing her own period of being homeless and losing her hair. She also made everyone laugh. We also heard from Priya Oberoi, head of an investment fund for Fem Tech called Goddess Gaia Ventures– a former lawyer who went on her own Forged In Fire journey through cancer and fertility treatment which led her to realise the vacuum there is in funding around female health. She is a true pioneer. Thanks to all of you Queenagers who came to watch – it was great to meet so many of you in person. I really loved it.

Then Wednesday morning: off to Saga in Kings Cross in the snow (no buses so my husband in a good bit of male ally ship whizzed me down there as I panicked in the car). There I gave a Queenager keynote. All the usual greatest hits – changing the narrative, the opportunity for brands, how we are a pioneering cohort of women. Their IWD theme was around gendered ageism (appropriately). It finished with a panel where we were all asked how many hours a week we worked by a younger woman in the audience who was worried that workaholicsm was a necessary adjunct to success.

It was a sticky moment for the brilliant Christine Armstrong who was moderating (above left ) : we all worked crazy hours. The head of Saga Travel John said a minimum of 70 hours. Liz Dimmock, fab Founder of Moving Ahead (which powers the 30 Per Cent Club) and another female Founder confessed to workaholicism but said they were learning better boundaries from younger colleagues. I said I preferred not to think about it in terms of hours worked but that because I LOVE what I do and feel full of purpose and am in control of my time and diary (and make it to the pond to swim most days) I don’t feel oppressed by work. (My husband would disagree, he thinks I work harder now than I did as a newspaper executive) But it FEELS far more pleasurable – and that is the main point I think.

I then nipped out of  Saga to moderate another online panel: this time for The Inclusion Edit – a monthly digest of everything Diversity and Inclusion which beams out to top companies all over the world. Sophie Neary Group Managing Director of Meta Uk and Ireland told me about her Courage is Contagious campaign which is tackling all the subjects which are still uncomfortable in the work place from periods to menopause, baby loss to the attrition of Queenagers from corporates. I also interviewed Hanneke Smits new Global Chair of the 30 Per Cent club and CEO of BNY Mellon Investments about how far we have come but how fare there is to go: she says there is a second brain drain now out of companies around Queenagers – that women come back after parental leave these days but leave in droves at around 45-50. That is a HUGE problem if we are going to get to equality and parity in leadership for women – she said it would take another 300 years.

I finished off the day with a late lunch with my old friend Rosie Millard. A great Queenager success story. Rosie went through a midlife clusterfuck of her own: a brain tumour (thankfully benign) a divorce (tricky involving kids and bitterness as they always do) but is now a picture of health and happiness. Re-married, joyful – we chatted about the sweetness that comes after that midlife hit. About how sad and painful, frightening and bleak the time of change can be but how wonderful and golden the aftermath is: how we are living proof that in the grief of loss there is space for renewal and something wonderful to come into our lives if we met it. There is, as we say at Noon, So Much More to Come.

My final IWD foray was to WOW - Women of the World at the Southbank - where I chaired a Marvellous Midlife panel with Meeta Syall, Anneliese Dodds MP (Labour Chair) and Sandie Okoro - secretary general of theWorld Bank. Impressive Queenagers. We talked about our midlife maelstroms and how that confluence of burdens - divorce, bereavement, redundancy, elderly parents, health issues, teens, family, ageism - all the things that hit at this point are not really discussed. We added in a bit of how we don’t want to be defined by menopause and about the sunny uplands of this time - increased confidence, purpose and not giving a fuck. Best of all was a surprise hug from some of the Noon ladies who came on our first Queenager retreat and had come to Wow specially to see me! here they are. I am the bright green splodge behind them on stage!

I’m heading off to Cornwall today to swim in the sea (8 degrees I hear rather than 3 degrees in the pond) and write some of my Queenager book. I’m also going to be doing a lot of resting and recuperating – it has been a busy time.

I’ll be back next week with some seaside reflections.

Best love

Eleanor