The business: women honoured for achievements

IT’S DOUBTFUL whether the entrepreneur Julie Meyer, founder of the dotcom-era business networking company First Tuesday, has ever suffered much from “imposter syndrome”.

At the Women Mean Business (WMB) conference, Ms Meyer advocated that female attendees adopt “an irrational level of persistence”. Having sold First Tuesday for $50 million in 2000, she set up Ariadne Capital “because I was tired of doing the work and not getting the credit for it”.

Earlier, attendees had wondered how to eradicate imposter syndrome – “that voice in your head that says you shouldn’t be there”, as Aisling Keegan, a senior sales manager at Dell, described it. This is the phenomenon that convinces successful people they are frauds, with their achievements due to mere luck.

There was a hush of recognition as Meyer discussed ways to deal with the meeting-room phenomenon of a man who repeats verbatim the idea of a female colleague and claims it as his own. An early boss did her a favour by telling her he would not promote her, she recalled. Women’s success “happens faster when you create your own rules of engagement, rather than break through someone else’s glass ceiling”.

Amid champagne and decorative splashes of pink at the Shelbourne Hotel in Dublin, there was formal recognition of five women. The WMB Businesswoman of the Year was Jean van Sinderen-Law, director of development at UCC. Nikki Evans of debit card company Perfect Card won Entrepreneur of the Year, while the Newstalk Social Entrepreneur of the Year was Jillian van Turnhout, head of the Children’s Rights Alliance.

The Microsoft WMB Woman in Technology award was won by Damini Kumar, an inventor and lecturer at NUI Maynooth, while disability awareness campaigner Caroline Casey of Kanchi won the Accenture/WMB Big Idea award.