What is the Women IN podcast about?

Women IN is a podcast hosted by Sondra Connor where one woman per episode describes the field she works in, how she got there, and what it actually cost her. Guests come from aerospace, nuclear, AI policy, accounting, higher education, fitness and more. Most of them changed fields partway through their career.

How often do new Women IN episodes come out?

A new episode of Women IN is released every Friday.

Where can I listen to Women IN?

Women IN is available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, iHeartRadio, and any podcast app that accepts an RSS feed.

Who hosts the Women IN podcast?

Women IN is hosted by Sondra Connor, founder of the fractional marketing firm The Cheeky Rooster.

How do I become a guest on Women IN?

Anyone can put themselves or someone else forward through the guest form at thewomeninpodcast.com. The show looks for women who can describe their own field concretely, not public speakers with a prepared talk.

Women IN | The Podcast About the Women Who Actually Do the Work

EPISODE 001 · AEROSPACE → ORGANIZATIONAL DEVELOPMENT

Lauren Fitzpatrick Shanks

CEO and Chief Wonderer, KeepWOL

Aerospace engineering was not her idea. She was very good at it anyway: first Black woman to graduate from the University of Kansas' aerospace engineering department, first to win the AIAA international design competition, six figures within a few years of graduating. Then she worked out that the work did not match what she believed, which is a much harder problem than not being good at something.

She nearly did the PhD in psychology instead of the MBA. The pull toward how people actually work together never went away, and eventually it became a company. We get into what that early salary meant at 25, what it costs to stay somewhere out of alignment, and why she calls the venture capital she raised a false success metric.

OUT 3 SEPTEMBER 2026

EPISODE 002 · ADVERTISING → HIGHER EDUCATION

Dr. Connie Clary

Marketing and management professor · Consultant · Speaker

Twenty plus years inside consulting and organizational development, working with leaders on strategy, growth and the unglamorous business of making an organization actually function. Then higher education, which was not the plan, and turned out to be the part she loved: getting students to connect the theory in the textbook to how a business actually behaves on a Tuesday.

She has taught marketing, management, leadership, entrepreneurship, organizational behavior and strategy, undergraduate through doctoral, and built programs and curriculum around it. Now she does all of it at once, teaching, consulting and speaking, including what AI is doing to marketing, leadership and the way people work and learn. Her own line is the one we are chasing: the most interesting paths are rarely linear, and one chapter usually turns out to be the foundation for the next.

OUT 18 SEPTEMBER 2026

EPISODE 003 · EMERGENCY RESPONSE → NUCLEAR

Danielle Allen

Podcast Host & Creator, Naked Nuclear

Firefighter. Paramedic. Commercial pilot and flight instructor. Physics teacher in Vietnam. She now works on nuclear recruiting and workforce development, hosts Naked Nuclear, and is taking a graduate nuclear engineering class on top of all of it.

She gets into whether there is genuinely a thread through all of that or whether that is a story assembled afterwards, the fire truck seat built for someone twice her size, and what is actually working for women in nuclear right now, not only what is not.

OUT 25 SEPTEMBER 2026

EPISODE 004 · COLLEGE → MARKETING

Amelia Christofferson

Marketing and sales student, Grand Canyon University

Amelia is still in it. She finishes her marketing and sales degree in December, and has already run the American Marketing Association's Grand Canyon chapter, with nine executive officers reporting to her, and mentored three undergraduates through GCU Women in Business.

Most career shows talk to people thirty years in. This one also talks to someone standing at the very start of it: what she is being told, what she believes, and what she is already worried about. Ask us again in ten years.

OUT 2 OCTOBER 2026

EPISODE 005 · AUTOMOTIVE → FITNESS

Alexandria Stylianou

Certified FASTer Way coach · Business owner

More than a decade in the automotive industry doing business development, marketing, management and commercial fleet sales, most of it as the only woman in her department. She now coaches women through strength training and nutrition, and she co-owns an auto repair business with her husband, so she never entirely left.

Fifteen years in fitness and a stint as a competitor means she knows exactly how little of the standard advice survives contact with a three year old and a five year old. She gets into the only-woman-in-the-room years, what transfers from selling fleet vehicles to coaching, and why she refuses the idea that a woman picks between her family, her business and her own health.

OUT 9 OCTOBER 2026

EPISODE 006 · CAMPAIGNS → AI POLICY

Whitney Daniels

Senior Advisor to the Governor of Arizona

Whitney leads the Governor's Artificial Intelligence Steering Committee, the body that pulls government, academia, industry and community into one room to decide how Arizona actually uses AI. She is a lawyer by training, and she came up through campaigns and political strategy before moving inside the building. Nationally she has worked on AI governance with the National Governors Association, the Partnership for Public Service, InnovateUS, Princeton and the Aspen Institute.

Government is where most people assume nothing moves. We are getting into what it takes to shift an institution that size, what campaign work teaches you that an agency never will, and the line she actually argues: that technology should not just make government more efficient, it should make it more trustworthy.

OUT 16 OCTOBER 2026

EPISODE 007 · CORPORATE FINANCE → ENTREPRENEURSHIP

Melissa K. Diaz

CPA · Co-owner and Partner, High Rock Accounting

Melissa is a CPA who will tell you that hiring a CPA is not your first move, which is not what most CPAs say. She left corporate finance to co-found accounting firms from nothing, so this is an entrepreneur talking to entrepreneurs rather than an advisor describing the view from outside.

This one is practical. The first three financial things to do when you start something, what a new owner can genuinely handle herself and what she should never touch, the difference between a bookkeeper and an accountant and a CPA and a CFO, and the most expensive mistake she sees in year one. Then what she notices about how women run their own numbers, and what she would say to a woman who is quietly intimidated by her own books.

LATEST EPISODE · OUT 23 OCTOBER 2026

EPISODE 008 · MEDICINE → NEGOTIATION

Dr. Gloria Esoimeme

Physician · Negotiation strategist · Speaker · Real estate advisor

Medical school in Nigeria, then arriving in the United States with $250 and a ten year plan: a master's, a PhD and a residency. She did all three inside ten years. Hospitalist, then medical director of palliative care, then outpatient, with a real estate business running alongside the whole time. Then she resigned from a job she loved and started over in Dubai.

Negotiation is her favorite subject in the world, and she has the receipts. A colleague had the idea for a three day week and did not say it when her turn came. Gloria asked for three days at full pay and full vacation, then followed up until the answer was yes. Every doctor at that hospital still has that option. She is number five of seven, and the child her family sent to ask their father, which is where she learned to have answers to the objections ready before she walked in.

Eighteen years across healthcare, leadership, business and entrepreneurship, lived and worked across Nigeria, the United States and the UAE. She now coaches professionals through difficult conversations: how to negotiate your value, build the confidence to ask, and open doors that were not going to open on their own.

OUT 30 OCTOBER 2026

EPISODE 009 · PRIVATE SECTOR → HIGHER EDUCATION

Lindsey Wilson

Chief Marketing and Communications Officer, Maricopa Community Colleges

Two decades across the private and public sectors: marketing and sales at a health and wellness company that was later acquired, then the City of Tempe, then a community college, and now the marketing and communications function for a system serving more than 140,000 students. The interesting part is the join. Somewhere in her thirties she decided she did not want to look back and say she had made other people a lot of money, and she took a significant step backwards in title and pay to find out whether higher education would work.

What she does now she describes as holding a megaphone, and her position is that the size of it matters far less than who you hand it to. She works on student stories in a way she does not work on anything else, and shows students the piece to ask whether it is authentic to them. A lot of them say nobody ever believed they were worth doing something with. She also says she still walks into rooms assuming everyone there is smarter than she is.

OUT 6 NOVEMBER 2026

EPISODE 010 · CORPORATE MARKETING → GENERATIVE AI

Nancy A. Shenker

Founder and CEO, theONswitch · Former CMO, Reed Exhibitions

Her own opening line is that she is 70, she is a tech enthusiast, and she is probably the most dangerous person in your marketing budget. Four decades of it: marketing strategist at Citibank and Mastercard, chief marketing officer at Reed Exhibitions, and then out on her own in her forties to build theONswitch. She has written four business books, runs a newsletter she has kept going for more than twenty years, and is currently serializing her memoir as a digital comic.

Her argument is that companies hand the AI strategy to the most junior people in the building because they assume youth equals fluency, and that this is exactly backwards. A language model rewards market sensing, emotional nuance and pattern recognition, which are the things four decades actually buy you. She also points out that most AI is built by a narrow and largely male group, while women drive the clear majority of consumer spending, and asks what that mismatch is costing.

OUT 13 NOVEMBER 2026

EPISODE 011 · FINTECH → LEGAL TECH

Amy Kugali McWilliams

Marketing leader, Epiq · Demand generation, growth and revenue strategy

Nearly twenty years of marketing across legal, technology and healthcare, driving growth and innovation for tech based businesses. The past decade of it in legal and eDiscovery, and before that fintech, healthcare tech and risk management, which is a lot of moving between industries that do not obviously talk to each other. The work itself is the unglamorous machinery: strategic plans for organizational growth, sales enablement programs, developing the internal talent to run them, and the cross functional collaboration that keeps several portfolios moving at once, with the data to say whether any of it worked. She has a master's from the University of Texas at Austin, which she will tell you is the number one ranked program in the country, a Leadership Principles certificate from Rice, and a base in Houston.

The episode is about the thing that reorganized everything. She was laid off at twenty-eight, a couple of years into a tech job, newly married and newly back in Houston, and the blow landed on her ego a full day before it reached her bank balance. The people who put her back together were almost none of them in her field. She also volunteers with the Prison Entrepreneurship Program, advising incarcerated men on the marketing for businesses they plan to run after release, and she has earned her wings and a prison name for it. It is Denzel, from Training Day.

OUT 20 NOVEMBER 2026

EPISODE 012 · PSYCHOLOGY → CFO

Kait Steinbicker

Client Relationship Leader, CLA Phoenix · Former CFO, operator and advisor

She studied psychology research and business at Wilfrid Laurier in Canada, then moved to Arizona for an MBA at Grand Canyon because she was interested in leadership and in Ken Blanchard's work. That is an unusual on-ramp to finance, and it explains a lot of what came after. She started in venture-backed SaaS, moved deeper into operating finance, and became a CFO, including at Pinnacle Advertising, a national agency. Along the way: supporting a founder through an exit, the merger that followed it, building teams, and putting in the ERP systems nobody thanks you for.

Then she crossed over into consulting and became a partner at Fintrepid Solutions, working alongside founders and leadership teams on growth and the financial and operational problems that come with it. Four years later she joined CLA, where the job is connection: connecting the dots inside a business, and connecting leaders with the people and resources they need next. She loves clean financials and what they tell you about a company, and she is clear that there is far more to a good business than the numbers. The through line is people and performance, which is where she started.

OUT 4 DECEMBER 2026

EPISODE 013 · ARMY → AI EDUCATION

Tiffany Pellot

Tiff the AI Princess · Co-founder, AI Ascend Impact

She goes by Tiff the AI Princess, and the title is doing more work than it looks like. Her argument is that AI is a Swiss Army knife and that most business owners never get far enough past being frightened of it to find out. So she starts by giving it real context about the business, then gives it hands to work on the screen, with the owner guiding and checking it the whole way.

What a business actually needs depends on whether you are starting, pivoting, growing or scaling, and she has done all four. She calls herself the Queen of Pivots. Her numbers, and they are hers to stand behind, are zero to $300,000 in a year and $535 to $90,000 in ninety days. The part most AI training skips is the one she leads with: a neuroscience informed read on why people freeze in front of this stuff before they ever get to the tools. This one closes season one.

OUT 11 DECEMBER 2026

SEASON TWO · EPISODE 001 · RETAIL TECH → FOUNDER

Vanessa Jean-Louis

Co-founder, RTM Nexus · Retail technology, events and media partnerships

She opens season two. Co-founder of RTM Nexus, where she connects technology solutions with retailers and brands through events, sponsorships and media partnerships. She is based in Central Florida, she is a solo mom of four, and all four of her kids play competitive sports, which is its own full time logistics operation running alongside the company.

She is candid about what building a business while parenting actually takes. Delegation. The invisible load. Learning when to stop being the bottleneck in your own company. She is interested in helping women reach their full potential and in using AI to make ordinary days easier, and her position is that ambition and motherhood can coexist, as long as everybody is honest about the tradeoffs and about the work behind the title.

OUT 15 JANUARY 2027

SEASON TWO · EPISODE 002 · REVENUE OPS → ADVISORY

Katarina Lujic

Founder, GTM Lab · Revenue and operations advisor to B2B software companies

She is the person companies call when revenue stops making sense. She goes into software businesses doing between one and fifteen million a year, works out what is actually broken, and tells them what to fix first. She has cut a sales cycle from a hundred and thirty-five days to sixty-five, and built the deck that won a twenty million dollar bridge round. Her line is that most founders think they have a leads problem when they have a diagnosis problem.

She has also been in the room for the fundraise. She helped raise twenty-one million for a company, and she is the one who built the growth projections while investors asked the male founder about growth. Right after the raise, the company pivoted in a direction she did not believe in, and she quit. Then she spent twelve weeks putting together a summit for women founders in Phoenix as a passion project, and found the thing she actually wants to do.

OUT 22 JANUARY 2027

SEASON TWO · EPISODE 003 · OPERATOR → ALLOCATOR

Danielle D'Agostaro

Managing Director, Alchemist · Early-stage venture

There is a gap in venture she thinks nobody talks about enough. The brand name multistage funds can put real platforms behind the companies they back: dedicated teams for recruiting, go to market, enterprise access. Early-stage funds, even very good ones, are usually one partner's network and however many hours that person has in a week.

She has worked both sides of it. Seven years helping build Alchemist's platform the first time, with more than four hundred technical founders, on the operational and commercialization side. Then six years as Principal Partner at WVV Capital, a $100 million corporate backed fund, learning to underwrite deals and think like an allocator rather than an operator. She is back at Alchemist as Managing Director, leading investment strategy across a portfolio that has raised more than $5 billion in follow on funding, with five unicorns and eighty plus exits. What she says she understands now that she did not the first time is that the resourcing gap is not only a founder problem. It is a structural advantage for whichever fund can close it.

OUT 29 JANUARY 2027

SEASON TWO · EPISODE 004 · RETAIL → PRODUCT DESIGN

Ariel Westphal

Founder, Blow Tissues · Consumer product design

She spent years in retail, merchandising and marketing, which is a long time to watch how people actually choose things. Then she picked the most overlooked object in the house and asked why it still looks the way it does. The tissue box. The one thing everybody owns, nobody thinks about, and most people hide.

Her whole argument is that just because we have always done something one way does not make it the best way, and that useful things are allowed to be beautiful too. That sounds small until you notice how much of a house is made of objects nobody ever redesigned. She is building Blow Tissues on better design, everyday luxuries, and a flat refusal to settle for mass-produced mediocrity.

OUT 5 FEBRUARY 2027

SEASON TWO · EPISODE 005 · HOSPITALITY → SOFTWARE

Samia Kohler

Founder, Event Sphere Solutions · Private event sales software

Eighteen years in hospitality, starting in France, then Shanghai, then Hong Kong, and now Phoenix. The service, the operations, and the particular chaos of selling private events with tools that were never built for selling private events. Spreadsheets. Email chains. No follow-up system. Deals lost not because nobody cared but because the process asked more than a working shift could give it.

So she built Sphere, a private event sales platform for restaurants, bars and venues, designed for the job rather than adapted to it. The part worth listening for is the handover: what it takes to stop being the person who knows the problem and become the person shipping the fix. She describes Sphere as the tool she wished she had, which is a more honest origin story than most software gets.

OUT 12 FEBRUARY 2027

SEASON TWO · EPISODE 006 · FOREIGN SERVICE → HIGHER ED

Heather Bomans

Executive Director, Business and Finance, University of Arizona · Former USAID Foreign Service Officer

She started in tax. Arthur Andersen, then tax manager at Callaway Golf working on global expansions and acquisitions, then her own CPA firm. That is a perfectly legible career, and then she joined the Foreign Service. As a USAID officer she ran global operations and budgets north of $100 million, with teams of 75 and up, on programs where the money is public and somebody is always counting.

She is now Executive Director for Business and Finance at the University of Arizona, advising more than 25 support business units on where the money goes and why the process is slowing them down. Three completely different institutions, one job underneath: work out what is actually broken, then get a room full of people to agree on it. That is the conversation.

OUT 19 FEBRUARY 2027

SEASON TWO · EPISODE 007 · CHRO → AI FOUNDER

Kelley Steven-Waiss

CEO and Co-founder, Novaworks · Former Chief Transformation Officer, ServiceNow

She spent thirty years inside the workforce function, most of it as a chief human resources officer, which is a job that shows you exactly where an organisation is broken and gives you very little authority to fix it. So she went and built the fix. Hitch was an AI-native platform for moving people to the work instead of the other way round. ServiceNow bought it in 2022 and made her their Chief Transformation Officer, which meant transforming the company that had just acquired her.

She is now CEO and co-founder of Novaworks, an AI-native HR operating system built on the ServiceNow platform, and sits on the boards of FormFactor and CiraSync. Her line on AI governance is sharper than most: the mistake is not handing work to a machine, it is handing it over without preserving human agency. Two books, two boards, four children.

OUT 26 FEBRUARY 2027

The women who actually do the work.

Information first. The inspiring part takes care of itself.

What she chose

What it cost

What she ran into

What she'd tell herself