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Yates' biggest professional setback was being forced in 1989 by pressure from America's religious right to resign as chief executive of Matilda, the company she'd founded a year earlier in New York with Australian journalist and friend Anne Summers. Matilda produced the feisty Sassy and Ms magazines. When Yates resigned, heartbroken, she "played scales for weeks and then went to Paris for a couple of weeks and let its beauty heal me".
The Matilda debacle was the only time Yates recalls being reduced to tears in a professional situation. "After I had to tell the staff that I was stepping down, I went into my office and sobbed, but I didn't do it in front of them. It was unhelpful to be vulnerable - it destabilises relationships, risks misinterpretation and leaves you prone to making mistakes."
But she has no regrets about the Matilda experience. "I learnt from it that I'm prepared to self destruct rather than compromise, and that's okay." Defining success as "richness of experience", says it "provides you with choices and allows you to do what you're interested in".
Michael Skinner, the media sales representative Yates married in 1980, jokes can he can always assess the scale of his wife's next project by the quality of the restaurant in which she chooses to tell him about it. When she announced her New York venture, he stayed behind to look after her children while they completed their education.
Always an activist, Yates devotes much of her time to causes close to her heart, although even she admits to suffering some "charity fatigue". She currently champions the Sydney Writers' Festival (of which she is its very dynamic chair); Books Alive (the GST-funded promotional book selling campaign which she invigorated after its slow start) and the Taronga Foundation, an unlikely project for a person who admits that "animals are not my thing".
Having been asked to join the foundation Yates was curious and researched the issues, finding "the questions around zoos and what they are for intellectually compelling." She's concluded that zoos are, basically, arks for preserving endangered species."
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