International publisher and advertising agency icon, Sandra Yates AO, holds a portfolio of positions in the private and public sectors. Here she discusses her views on management, and her enthusiasm for coaching the leaders of the future. Lauren Thomsen-Moore reports.

Escaped from poverty, she has found success in the corporate world without giving up her sense of humour or her femininity.

When the sisterhood surged in the early ’70s, writing the texts and shaping the politics of what we now recognise as Australian feminism’s first wave, Sandra Yates was a solo mother with two young children struggling to escape a Brisbane typing pool. She was poor, under-educated – having left school at 15 – and had been through two disastrous relationships; both times, she ended up losing the home.

I’m Peter Thompson and it’s good to be with you for the third in this series of The Wisdom Interviews.  This week I’m joined by Sandra Yates. Sandra wears a few different hats: she’s the Chair of the Board of advertising bigwigs, Saatchi & Saatchi; she’s also Chair of the New South Wales TAFE Commission Board and the Sydney Writers’ Festival. She’s been involved in the Taronga Foundation, the Australian Council for Women, Musica Viva and an array of other groups.

 Read the interview online at the ABC website...

Sandra Yates still remembers her first encounter with male chauvinism. She was 26 years old and had just bought a copy of “The Female Eunuch,” Germaine Greer’s feminist book. “Someone, I suspect one of my brothers, ripped the cover off,” Ms. Yates recalled. “It was my first hint that anyone would resent the idea that men and women are equal.”

Sandra Yates has climbed to the top of a male dominated corporate world by never taking the easy road. On Friday afternoons in the early 1980s, when most of The Sun newspaper's advertising department had drifted across the road to the Clare (their local watering hole), someone always stayed behind.