Gloria Feldt is an acclaimed expert on women, power, and leadership with frontline leadership experience, a bestselling author, and an in-demand keynote speaker. She is co-founder and president of Take The Lead, whose mission reflects her life’s passion: to prepare, develop, inspire, and propel women to take their fair and equal share of leadership positions across all sectors by 2025 by providing breakthrough training, mentoring, and coaching role modeling, and thought leadership. She is the bestselling author of five books. Her latest, Intentioning: Sex, Power, Pandemics and How Women Will Take The Lead launched September 28, 2021, shows how we can seize the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity of massive disruption to build back stronger with women at the center of the recovery. Through the lens of women’s stories, it delivers a fresh set of leadership tools, skills, and concepts that help all women reach their own highest intentions, purposefully creating new norms while guiding institutions to break through the remaining barriers to gender and racial parity for everyone’s good.
She is formerly president and CEO of the world’s largest reproductive health and advocacy organization, Planned Parenthood Federation of America. She was named by Vanity Fair one of “America’s Top 200 Women Leaders, Legends, and Trailblazers,” Glamour’s “Woman of the Year,” She Knows Media Inspiring Woman, Women’s eNews 21 Leaders for the 21st Century, Women Economic Forum Circle of Light award, Texas Monthly’s Texas 20, Martin Luther King Living the Dream Award, Diversity Leadership Alliance Diversity Leader Award, and Forbes 40 Over 40.
Previous books include No Excuses: 9 Ways Women Can Change How We Think About Power which became the basis for 9 Leadership Power Tools curriculum and Send Yourself Roses which was coauthored with Kathleen Turner.
She teaches “Women, Power, and Leadership” at Arizona State University. Feldt has been widely quoted and published, including by the New York Times, Washington Post, USA Today, The Daily Beast, Forbes, Fast Company, Time, Huffington Post, Glamour, Elle and Ms. She has appeared on CNN, MSNBC, the Today Show, Good Morning America and The Daily Show, and an infinite number of podcasts.
Gloria is an awesome chili maker. She and her husband Alex Barbanell live in New York City and Scottsdale, Arizona; they share a combined family of six children and 15 grandchildren. She spends too much time on social media and invites you to connect with her there @GloriaFeldt.
