Kweilin Moore Ellingrud ’99 had a bit of an unusual childhood.
She was born and raised in Seattle. When she was 11, her father had “a soul-searching moment” after recovering from a life-threatening illness and decided to take her and her younger brother out of school and travel the world for 15 months.
From then on, she was never in one place for long, Kweilin says. She lived with a host family and attended a local school in France for a year, then did the same in China for two-and-a-half years. She spent her junior year of high school in Ecuador at a naval academy and her senior year at an all-girls school in Japan.
“That was a formative experience, because I’d never experienced an all-women’s environment before that,” Kweilin says. “But that high school was really powerful in taking away all the distractions in learning and just creating really strong friendships with classmates—and I think ultimately helped shape my decision to go to Wellesley.”
Nowadays, Kweilin lives in Minnesota, though she recently spent a year in Shanghai, where her three daughters attended the same school she had 30 years earlier. She is a senior partner at McKinsey & Company and director of the McKinsey Global Institute. Growing up in so many different countries, but especially China and Japan, Kweilin observed “two ends of the [gender equality] spectrum,” which got her thinking about how women “live and lead in different ways around the world.”
For the past 12 years, she has researched gender equality in the workplace, and she recently co-authored a book about women in corporate America, The Broken Rung: When the Career Ladder Breaks for Women—and How They Can Succeed in Spite of It (Harvard Business Review Press).
“Women are outperforming men academically, but then fall behind as they get into the work world,” Kweilin says. The solution she and her co-authors propose is seeking out “experience capital,” the cumulative knowledge, skills, and wisdom women acquire through on-the-job experience. “If women can build better, consistent experience capital on the job, we can close some of these gender-pay gaps,” she says.
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