[Sanity Check]

– The women behind an NFL team. In introducing the Most Powerful Women International list on Tuesday, we mentioned that some of the honorees came from industries where women are still rare: chemicals and oil and gas and metal manufacturing.
Now, the Wall Street Journal is out with a new story about women owning another arena that’s typically male-dominated: the front office of an NFL organization.

The WSJ profiles the Philadelphia Eagles, whose owner Jeffrey Lurie has an advisory team that’s more than 50% female, with chief of staff Tina D’Orazio, general counsel Aileen Dagrosa, SVP of marketing and media Jen Kavanagh, SVP of revenue and strategy Catherine Carlson, and executive director of the Eagles Autism Challenge Ryan Hammond holding top jobs. It won’t surprise you that the Eagles are an outlier in the league, where women account for 28% of franchise jobs despite a fanbase that’s near gender parity.
Lurie says it wasn’t necessarily his intention to hire women. Rather, his goal was to assemble a staff with “diversity of thought,” which meant hunting for candidates beyond traditional football circles. “That seems to result in lots of women winning these hiring decisions,” he says.
There are parallels, of course, between Lurie’s experience and that of boardrooms searching for new perspectives, with the latter starting to look beyond typical candidates—namely current or former CEOs—to find directors who are not male and not white.
The results of the Eagles’ unintentional diversity push echo the proven upside of diversity in the corporate world too. Philadelphia is considered a league leader in using analytics in player evaluation and game-time decision making, and it’s stood out for its embrace of players’ social justice causes; other teams have downplayed or dismissed them. And if ever there was a mic-drop—er, football-spike—moment in the debate over the benefits of diverse viewpoints, the Eagles pulled it off in 2018 by winning sports’ ultimate title, the Super Bowl.


https://fortune.com/2019/09/26/phila...ice-women-nfl/





.

[Carseller4]

Gayle Benson---New Orleans Saints