2024

Jane Hamilton Nielsen

Chief operating Officer, Ralph Lauren

“Women on boards have an obligation to mentor, influence, recommend, and pull more women into the boardroom.”

The polarized society in the United States that we live in is threatening democratic values. What action do you think we can take as various individuals to impact this particular space?

I do think it’s a concern. One of the challenges today is you can choose a belief and only hear and educate yourself to reinforce that belief or that supposition, or that narrative. I think it’s important that we encourage people to educate themselves on different perspectives, different aspects of an issue, or seek out different media, different voices, different ways of looking at things. One of the books that stood out to me when I was young—and my kids have read it, too—was To Kill A Mockingbird. Atticus [Finch] talks to Scout and says, ‘You don’t really understand a person until you try to understand something from their perspective. Until you put yourself in their skin and walk in it.’ If we educated ourselves on different points of view, and we walked with empathy, it may not change your point of view, but it would allow for dialogue and it would allow for discourse. It would allow for human connection. Even if you find it doesn’t change your point of view, it will change your attitude, it will change your approach, and hopefully it will be called civility, which I think is the first step in moving away from polarization.

With all of the different issues that one could focus on from gun violence to child poverty, is the pursuit of gender equality one of the most pressing issues in today’s society?

I think equity and equality are critical issues, and gender inequality is a manifestation of that. When you think about the world, gender inequality impacts more than half of the population, and while we can view it from where we are today and develop, it takes many different forms around the world and can influence so many issues. And there are so many issues so I don’t know that I can sit here and say what’s the most important. But I think it’s a huge issue. It impacts our families, it plays a role in domestic violence, it impedes access to education, it impedes access to progression and role models that we set for the next generation. So, I think it’s a critically important issue and makes me ask how do we create a more equitable society for everyone.
My daughter Helen wrote a junior paper on an aspect of the Suffragette. And for a while I just sat there and said to myself, that’s not that long ago. And yet you look around the world, and you realize we have so far to go.

What do you think is the number one action as a society we can take to empower women and gender equality?

I think that there’s an issue of access and an issue of empowerment, and I think one step that we can take is to really embrace the Family Act that allows for parental leave, caregiver leave, and medical leave in this country. It is astonishing that as a country we don’t have that. How can women fully embrace their potential if they don’t have even the barest minimum of support networks with life crises happening? How can you be fully engaged and living up to your potential if you don’t have the means to care for them or for yourself? I think that as a society, the more we allow and foster our ability to take care of the next generation and to take care of the generation that brought us up, the better we’ll be. Women will be unleashed and more powerful by being supported in the many roles that they bring to the world, and so will men. And I think we’re so close. But how long do we have to wait? It’s absurd. It’s unacceptable.

Can you tell us a short story where you feel that you may have encountered some kind of gender block.

Yes, and it goes back a long way in my career. I was a consultant. I’d say I was a few years out of business school, and I was sent on an assignment for a large company to go to Australia to look at a manufacturing facility for potential retooling to serve a broader Asian market. I arrive with my team and I’m the team manager, I have another woman and two men on my team. We arrive at the plant, and as you might expect, it’s a male plant manager and all-male plant management team. We have a very specific agenda to test a way of manufacturing to serve this new export market in the East. It’s coming from the higher ups. The plant manager said, ‘I don’t believe this. I’m not going to do what a woman is telling me to do,’ says it explicitly right out there. He’s lined up with his team, and I’ve got my team, and I had to take a moment and say this will happen either with you or without you but we’re going to do this. So I had to have this moment of you’re a bully. I’m coming back at you. He said, ‘But tell me what you think will work. And what are the top five things you think could go wrong?’ And then what are the things that you think would indicate if it’s successful?’ So we started to try to break it down: What are the facts here? What do you have to see? And I said, ‘I tell you what, let’s have one person on my team, and one person from your team, and they can monitor the risks and the successes for two weeks, and then we’ll come back together, and I’ll make a commitment to you that nothing will go to corporate until we look at it together.’ I said you can get back to me tomorrow and if you’re not back to me tomorrow, I’ll ask for another manager who can come in and implement the program. The next day he came back to me, and I can’t say he came back all happy. That didn’t happen. I think he came back understanding this woman was going to make it happen at least felt like he had had input. At the end of the day, it turned into a positive experience. But it sure didn’t start out that way.

We talk about how asking for salary requirements in jobs and how that shouldn’t be part of an interview process, and how it does happen. People do, do it. And the pay gap continues to be very relevant to men and women. Do you think that should become more of a nationwide ban like New York? Do you feel it could be? Do you think it should be?

I think the ban is helpful as we strive for pay equality because what we want to do is pay people for their experiences in previous jobs, for their knowledge, education, and life experiences. I mean, some of the most powerful experiences in my life, I didn’t get paid for. I didn’t get paid to take care of my mom while she was in hospice; I can tell you I bring more to my job because I did that. Previous salaries don’t reflect life experiences, and I think it impacts women. For women who have the opportunity [to have a child], they choose to stay at home. They’re not paid for that, but I guarantee you they bring to the workforce knowledge, patience, a life experience that is valuable for many jobs. They may have been out of the workforce for a number of years, and they shouldn’t be penalized for that. I’m really an advocate for evaluating the life experience that somebody brings to the table.

What do you feel about how to continue and support and enhance the growth presence of women in high profile positions? How do we do that without it feeling like it’s forced?

I think that it has to be a systemic program. We need to start by looking at how we bring women into positions that are board recruitable while not talking about the boardroom specifically. Women on boards have an obligation to mentor, influence, recommend, pull more women into the boardroom or mentor women who are ready for that kind of board position to make sure they’re positioning themselves to be board candidates and proactively advocating themselves for that. I think one of the most powerful things that we can say is, I see your potential. I know you can do this. We don’t often encourage women to have strong voices, or to advocate for themselves. There’s so much research: women have to be the caretaker, they have to be perceived as selfless, they have to have all these wonderful qualities, but I believe they have to be balanced with confidence, self-advocacy, those things that balance other wonderful qualities that help you get ahead.

Tell me one thing about yourself that defined the moment and experience in your life that brought you to where you are today.

Well, that leads in perfectly. I was in the 8th grade. We had just moved from an Army base in Texas to Alexandria, Virginia. And I sat in my homeroom classroom, which was 20 minutes for one solid year, and no human being spoke to me. I was very traumatized by this, and I was telling my mom, ‘Nobody likes me,’ and she said to me, ‘Jane, you’ve got a choice. You could walk in the room and believe nobody likes me, and nobody wants me to succeed. That they’re all looking at me like I’m failing. Or you can walk in the room and say, everyone here wants me to succeed, everyone here likes me. Imagine how you’ll feel when you walk in the room, and you’ve told yourself the other story.’ I really took it to heart. It was this moment where I was just going to act like everybody wants me to win, and I started running for student elections. Here I am, this girl that nobody would talk to, and all of a sudden, I think I’ll run for Vice President and if I don’t win, I’ll try out for the play! I decided, well, they won’t care, they like me, they want me to succeed. And it was just like this moment of change for me that was really impactful.

When we talk about changes in the political landscape that women over the past years have tried to bring to the table and make possible. Do you feel that the change has or is changing?

I do. I mean just in the last decade we’ve had two amazing candidates for President, who are two women who are incredibly qualified, unbelievably strong role models for our daughters. I won’t talk about how I feel that it hasn’t happened yet.
It’s going to happen. We’ve had a Speaker of the House who’s a woman, we’ve got more voices. Is it enough? Not yet… but I can see it even in the conversations I have with my own children. They’re very encouraged by having a younger vibrancy on the ticket.

Education, education, education. President Obama used to say that Education is one of the top 3 responsibilities of a civilized society. And why is this prohibitive? Made expensive for young people? In the current situation where education is concerned, what’s your take on that? And having children, I mean, you’re in the space.

I’m an economist by training so I know that supply and demand forces expenses. But I think the issue is affordability, right? If education is a calling to a better society, I believe there’s no better investment. We can catch children when they’re so young and give them a quality education that sets them up for success in the early years. Whereas if they don’t learn how to read by third grade, the dropout rate becomes on an exponential curve all the way through to college and advanced degrees. As a society, we need to recommit ourselves to investing in the future. Education and childcare are great places to start.

if you could have somebody’s job for a day, whose job would it be? And why?

Okay, so I have a maybe an offbeat answer to this. Atul Gawande, he’s The New York Times writer on health, and he wrote a book called Being Mortal and it’s about medicine, and what matters in the end. He went out and viewed different people’s lives at the end of their life. I think you get so much insight and passion. How do you navigate this last chapter? How do we bring dignity to an aging population that deserves it? There’s so much wisdom that I don’t think we, as a society, always value in our older generation. What lessons are we missing from them? What’s the power of the extended family, and how do we facilitate that? So, I loved his book. I would have loved to spend a day on his journey, as he was gathering the information for that. And just with his medical perspective, psychological perspective, I would just love to understand that better.

What do you feel has been the best piece of advice you’ve ever gotten?

It’s from my mom again. Her advice, which she would say to my sister and I, is ‘life is a feast.’ It’s this idea that it’s not about the end, right? Or it’s not about the goal. It’s about finding the joy in that moment, if you’re looking around you can find the feast in even the worst of circumstances. And it’s about just finding the good in a person. She really was somebody who celebrated life even in the worst of circumstances. This is the human experience. This is what we’re supposed to be doing. I love that. So, in my life, I had my mom saying that. And my dad, the West Pointer, he is duty, honor, country. Be true to your purpose. It was this great balance. My dad was also a joyful person, but he was also a West Pointer, with all of the rectitude and integrity that comes with that.

Tell me a little bit about your favorite book.

Well, it’s too hard to have a favorite book. I love reading. I have a favorite book of the moment, which is The Women by Kristen Hannah, which is the story of nurses in the Vietnam War. I feel like it hasn’t been explored. And I love that she just told this amazing, great piece of fiction, but she’s also telling a story of these unseen heroes. And my dad, did two tours in Vietnam, so the places and the experiences, while I didn’t experience them, I just felt a connection to it from my dad.
I’m also a big Edith Wharton fan, so the Age of Innocence, and this female immersion from societal bonds. I mean, those are the books that I go back to and read.

What do you feel you most value in friends?

That they see all of me and love me anyway.

Which trait are you most uncomfortable with within yourself and others?

Impatience.

What do you consider is an overrated virtue?

Prudence.