When a very tough, old school leader announced that I was his pick to be Chief of Station in a small but important frontier post, a few competitors complained to me directly 'why would they send you?' I owe that leader much for believing in me at a time when few women were given these opportunities.
There have been too few women in leadership because they haven't had the opportunities.
Lots of women candidates get compared to one another because there's so few women in office and positions in corporate America.
I grew up military but have met very few women that have a mission plan for when things don't work out. I attack everything like that.
Most women experience issues of power and sexuality, but very few women talk about it. There's the threat of the loss of approval.
We have a massive shortage of engineers and one of the big glaring holes is that we have so few women doing engineering - it's less than 10 per cent of the workforce.
Throughout my working life, I've been either one of very few women or the most senior woman in the place.
I'm one of the few women in science. I have pioneered that. One of the things I worry about is what that pioneering has done to me. I have had to fight quite hard most of the way through life.
Even after such milestones as Kathryn Bigelow winning an Oscar, there still seem to be few women in leadership roles.
The tech industry - and, more specifically, Silicon Valley - continues to stumble forward in earnest about how few women are represented in its top ranks of management and on its boards.
