Conference examines women's contributions to changing industries

Increasingly, women are changing the face of industry and finding ways to merge business with social responsibility.

This was one of many topics discussed at the ninth annual Wharton Women Business Conference. The conference, titled “Leadership: Transformed & Redefined,” was held Friday at the Inn at Penn. The event featured Lori Greeley, the chief executive officer of Victoria’s Secret Stores, and Denise Morrison, the chief operating officer of the Campbell Soup Company, as keynote speakers. The conference attracted roughly 200 people, many of them Penn students.

Greeley spoke on her experience as a woman in business and how she has been able to achieve success. She set the tone for the event by discussing how Victoria’s Secret buys and uses organic cotton grown by women in developing countries — a business practice that allows these women, in turn, to finance an education for their daughters.

Two panel discussions complemented the keynote addresses. The first, “Women Transforming Industries,” focused on women who have developed unique business models. Lauren Bush, one of the panelists and CEO and co-founder of FEED Projects, described the primary purpose of her business as humanitarian. The company sells bags and other merchandise from which a portion of the profits are donated to the United Nations World Food Program.

According to Wharton senior Elyse Sholk, the conference chairwoman, the idea for the panel emerged partly from the previous year’s conference. “Through my one-on-one interactions with last year’s panelists and my reflections on the program during and after the conference, I realized that the concept of transformation was a pervasive theme in many of the organizations that the panelists led,” Sholk wrote in an e-mail.

The second discussion — “Women Redefining Social Responsibility” — was inspired primarily by Sholk’s interest in combining business with socially-conscious work.

Wharton and College freshman Stephanie Vabre thought that the panel discussions were relevant to “the diverse audience,” and enjoyed hearing about “the many different aspects of a company, from finance to logistics to marketing.” She also appreciated that the panelists themselves came from a “variety of industries.”

Two Chinese university students currently studying abroad at Columbia University, Danchen Bao and Dongze Lu, came to Penn for the day to attend the event. Bao found Greeley’s address interesting and inspiring. “Maybe some years from now, I will be in her position too,” she said.

This article was updated to reflect that this year's conference marked the ninth annual Wharton Women Business Conference, rather than the 13th annual.

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