San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Marie Claire’s Power Trip returns, as does fashionista fave Andrew Gn.
The business of being a woman is ripe for disruption, to use local parlance, and the Marie Claire Power Trip — which just powered through its third iteration — shows that so, too, is the concept of a “woman’s conference.” In place of cold conference rooms were cow pasture hikes, and gone are the “how to do it all” platitudes in favor of real talk about both work and life.
Some 200 high-powered women from New York and San Francisco (and a few from Texas) convened in the Bay Area Oct. 15-16 for a two-day event that was part panel discussion, part spend-the-night get-together. The VIP guest list included execs Away founder Jen Rubio and Pinterest Chief Operating Officer Francoise Brougher; Hollywood power types Sharon Stone, Jennifer Garner and Ellen Pompeo; and even San Francisco Mayor London Breed, who dropped by to speak about the powerful women who had helped her in life.
On the docket were talks and walks that, as Marie Claire editor-in-chief Anne Fulenwider (pictured above left with Jennifer Garner) says, bring the pages of the magazine to life — albeit more extemporaneously. Before dinner, Fulenwider and Stone sat by the fireplace under a Klimt painting (the location was strictly off the record) for a frank discuss about what it was like to become a sex symbol in the ’90s before “#MeToo” was a thing. “I can’t remember all the s— that people did — and there was no one to tell,” Stone said.
The next day, Pompeo matched Stone’s candor about the evolution of how women “should” behave. “I don’t think it’s easy for a woman to come out and expose herself and feel shame and feel weakness and say, ‘This was done to me,’ ” said Pompeo, who shared that the encouragement of other women helped her become one of the highestpaid actresses in Hollywood. “Let’s stop with the shame — that we were assaulted, or that we were lowballed.”