Episode 1
Featuring Erin Loos Cutraro
This year marks the 100th anniversary of the 19th amendment- the amendment that allowed women to vote. And there’s no question that this election cycle has been one for the history books for other reasons too, with impacts from one of the deadliest pandemic this nation has ever experienced, to the protests and powerful Black Lives Matter movement that shed light on the issue of systemic racism in the United States. With the election beginning to wrap up, and our newest president announced, Joe Biden, alongside his vice president Kamala Harris, a new wave of politics has come around, and this new wave features women.
Because of this huge topic that has been rocking the nation, I decided to kick off this new series of podcast reviews with “WSJ Secrets of Wealthy Women,” by the Wall Street Journal. This podcast features women who are self-made executives, workplace pioneers, industry trendsetters, other female business experts to talk with the host, Veronica Dagher, about various business topics. The episode I decided to listen to is titled “Erin Loos Cutraro: On Why Women Should Run for Office.” I found this topic to be fitting, because of all the points about the election I made before.
Erin Loos Cutraro is the founder and CEO of She Should Run, a nonpartisan nonprofit that encourages women of all backgrounds and all walks of life to run for public office. Right off the bat, she mentions that women have the potential for being successful candidates in all public offices, since they have humongous impacts on our day to day lives. However, many women do not see themselves as possible candidates, even with over 500,000 elected officials in the country. Cutraro states her beliefs that in order to maintain a democracy, we must see voices and perspectives of diverse women in our elected roles.
Cutraro then goes on to talk about the challenges women must overcome to succeed in politics. Some of these include introducing politics and acceptance in young girls in the same way it is done for men, and helping women get started in seeing themselves as a politician. However, the challenge that stuck out to me was fundraising. Cutraro calls the flow of money in politics “a deep-seated old boys’ club” in that there is a lot of networking that needs to be done, and the majority of those networks are made up of men. This fact was alarming for me, especially since Cutraro continues to talk about this, saying that the majority of what her company's fundraising does is used to financially support the women that have actually made it onto the ballot. In addition, women have to explain their qualifications, whereas people assume men have the qualifications to be a politician, which in turn affects fundraising.
Overall, this episode highlighted the challenges of being a woman in politics at any stage, while still being encouraging to the listeners. Cutraro is an inspiration, showing her entrepreneurship for a good cause. I think that this podcast is very eye-opening, especially when it comes to the topics that are right in front of our faces all the time, like women in politics. I never realized that women still really have to assert their qualifications in order to appeal to the general public, because to me women are more qualified than men in general! I definitely learned a lot from listening to this episode, and I will be listening to the other episodes in the future.
If you are interested in hearing stories from women in essentially every business sector, whether it be wealth management, golf, beauty, or the big screen, I would highly recommend this podcast. The Wall Street Journal continues to be a leading source of credible news stories, and this podcast is an example of that. Also, the episodes are not long, most of them being less than 30 minutes, making them very digestible. The episode I listened to has definitely inspired me to continue listening to this podcast, and I hope you all give it a try as well!
Rating: 9 ears out of 10!
article by Sarah Guo ‘22
design by Lori Khashaki ‘24