Rahul Jacob: Working for women bosses is a privilege one must treasure

She had just heard from her assistant that I had been stuck in a malfunctioning subway train between 34th Street and 42nd Street and empathetically flipped the burden of being late from the candidate to circumstance.

I would put the phone down on my eldest brother without saying goodbye if she appeared at my door. She specialized in witty one-liners; I didn’t want to miss a word.

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Fifteen years later, I was working from home one Tuesday when an email from a long-time contributor to the FT Weekend landed. It was an 800-word screed of protest that felt like a grenade being detonated against the changes I was making to make articles more international.

While I was fretting, my phone rang. It was the FT Weekend editor, backing me between peals of laughter about the writer’s sense of entitlement.

In much of the superb research that outlines the pay gap that persists between men and women despite advances in the workplace by women, little has been written about how women manage differently, and perhaps even less about how employees and organizations benefit from this.

I was recently sent an amusing and affectionate blog by a gifted woman food writer who had started at Fortune as a fact-checker, as I had.

She had written about Evey Benjamin, the then chief of reporters at the magazine who hired me as well, attributing to Benjamin the habit of meticulously double-checking facts. It depicted Benjamin as a larger-than-life personality, capturing her intelligence and charm.

What it didn’t say was that Benjamin was among a group of women researchers who about five decades ago were part of a class-action lawsuit against Time Inc, then the owner of Time, Fortune, People and Sports Illustrated.

She was among the first generation of women promoted to senior management roles at the media giant. As Nobel laureate Claudia Goldin observes in Why Women Won, of the 155 critical moments in women’s rights history in the US between 1905 and 2023, almost half occurred between 1963 and 1973. Decades on, much has changed for the better.

The editors-in- chief of The Economist, Wall Street Journal and Financial Times are all women. I am fortunate to know and admire two of them. WSJ’s editor-in-chief since February 2023, Emma Tucker, was FT Weekend editor when I worked in London in the early 2000s.

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Despite this progress, it is hard to find articles that examine the implications of a wider dispersion of talented women in management and how well suited their skills are to the knowledge economy, which needs managers much less hierarchical than those of the command-and-control industrial economy of yesteryear.

I have been lucky to work for women bosses most of my career. More truthfully, from that first interview weeks before my student visa in the US expired, my career has been crafted by charismatic women.

A former colleague this week reminisced about Benjamin sending her bottles of champagne and theatre tickets decades after they had worked together for helping her find a consultant for her husband’s medical claims.

Tucker has a tough brief, as she seeks to make WSJ more readable and more focused on readers, while making difficult decisions to lay staff off. Even so, a profile of her in the New York Times observed in 2023, “In interviews with nearly a dozen former and current staff members, Ms. Tucker was almost universally described as personable and reasonable."

Long before work-from-home was even a phrase in the early 2000s, she allowed me to do so on Tuesdays in London. Tucker’s irreverent humour made workdays fun. I once presented her with a garish pen with a fake pink flamingo feather at one end of it and jokingly suggested she take it to all her meetings. She did for months afterwards.

To say that women bosses are more empathetic and more attuned to a work-life balance is to state the obvious. When my parents visited New York, it seemed natural that Benjamin meet them, even though she was working in a different organization by then.

I recall discussing with Tucker, the mother of three sons as my working mother had been, what parenting was like in such circumstances. It was a memorable conversation to have at work, precisely because it had nothing to do with work.

Fast forward to Bengaluru today. Kamini Sawhney, former director of Museum of Art and Photography, and Hardika Shah, who heads Kinara Capital, became friends during interviews because they regarded the process as more than publicity.

Kavita Gupta Sabharwal, founder of Neev Academy, sat in on online classes she had devised that I conducted on the media and covid during the pandemic.

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Goldin underplayed one aspect of having more women leaders: They selflessly create a foundation for many employees to build careers upon.

The author is a Mint columnist and a former Financial Times foreign correspondent.