WOMEN [IN]…
Women IN, hosted by Sondra Connor
NEW EPISODE EVERY FRIDAY

The women who actually do the work.

One woman per episode, describing the field she works in, how she got there, and what it actually cost her. No panel. No keynote. Just the conversation you'd have with a friend who finally tells you what the job is really like.

Be a guest Listen now
Sondra Connor, host of Women IN
Women IN podcast cover art

WHAT EVERY EPISODE ASKS

Information first. The inspiring part takes care of itself.

You should finish an episode able to say "that's for me," or, just as usefully, "that is absolutely not for me." Ruling something out is progress, and it's the half of career advice nobody gives you. The lift comes on its own, once somebody tells you the truth about her work. Every guest gets the same four questions.

01

What she chose

The path she took, and the ones she nearly took instead. Including the choice that looked like a mistake at the time.

02

What it cost

Money, hours, moves, relationships, the things she gave up. The trade is real, so we say it out loud.

03

What she ran into

How being a woman changed the trajectory, including the parts that were not fair. We don't sand this down.

04

What she'd tell herself

The advice she'd hand her younger self, given the chance. Usually not what you'd expect, and usually worth writing down.

SEASON ONE · THE FULL LINEUP

Eight women, a new one every Friday.

They land weekly through October. Most of them changed fields partway through, which turns out to be the rule and not the exception. One is still a student, on purpose. The blank in the show's name moves, and so do most careers.

Read the full episode write-ups →  ·  What the first four taught me →

Lauren Fitzpatrick Shanks
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 NOW · 45 MINUTES
Dr. Connie Clary
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
Danielle Allen
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
Amelia Christofferson
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
Alexandria Stylianou
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
Whitney Daniels
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
Melissa K. Diaz
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.

OUT 23 OCTOBER
Dr. Gloria Esoimeme
EPISODE 008 · MEDICINE → NEGOTIATION

Dr. Gloria Esoimeme

Physician · Global health scholar · Negotiation coach

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.

OUT 30 OCTOBER

WHERE TO FIND IT

Follow now, and it turns up on its own.

The show is live on Spotify, Apple Podcasts and iHeartRadio, with a new episode every Friday. Follow wherever you already listen and the next one arrives without you having to remember anything.

SpotifyLISTEN NOW Apple PodcastsLISTEN NOW iHeartRadioLISTEN NOW RSS feedLIVE NOW

Prefer a different app? Almost all of them will take the RSS feed directly.

FIELDS WE'RE LOOKING FOR

Every field has one.

The brackets are a blank, and it's a wide one. This is not a STEM podcast. A student ruling out finance is served exactly as well as one discovering nuclear, and the woman who's been in payroll for eleven years has a better story than most keynotes.

Aerospace Finance Nuclear Human resources Venture capital Engineering Advertising Marketing Manufacturing Public policy + the one you're in

BE A GUEST

You're more interesting than you think.

You don't need a book, a keynote, or a follower count. You need a job you actually do and a willingness to be honest about it. If you just thought "nobody would want to hear about my work," hi. That's exactly who this show is for.

  • Any field, any level, any title, or no title at all
  • About 45 minutes, recorded remotely, zero prep
  • You'll see the four questions before we hit record. No gotchas
  • Season one is booking its first ten guests. You'd be among the first
  • Nominating someone else works too. We love a good setup

Pitching yourself is great. Pitching a friend is even better.

Sondra reads every one of these herself.

Sondra Connor, host of Women IN

THE HOST

Sondra Connor

Sondra has spent twenty years in marketing, most of it in industries that are hard to explain at a party: cybersecurity, enterprise IT, HR tech, energy, nuclear, AI. Ogilvy, PetroSkills, CyberScout, Ricoh, Culture Amp, and most recently Nuclearn, where she ran marketing and communications for an AI platform built for the nuclear power industry.

She founded The Cheeky Rooster, a fractional marketing firm, in 2023, and co-founded RAISUN Technology Services in 2025. She has an MBA and a bachelor's degree in creative writing, a combination that makes more sense than it sounds.

From 2023 to 2026 she was an adjunct professor at Grand Canyon University, teaching Introduction to Marketing to business students. That is where this show started. She is not a career coach and will not pretend to be one. She is just very good at getting people to tell her the true version.

LinkedIn The Cheeky Rooster Get in touch

"When I was an adjunct professor, my students knew exactly what accounting looked like. They knew what teaching looked like. Those are real careers, and some of them are going to be wonderful at both. What struck me was how short the list was. Nobody had shown them the fifteen directions marketing alone can go, or that engineering was a door standing open the whole time.

Being their advocate mostly meant making the list longer. That is all this show is, without the limit of fifty students in one semester. Women consistently underestimate how much they are worth and how much they are wanted, and I have watched one conversation change what somebody thought was available to her."

Sondra Connor, host

Get the next one when it lands.

One email when a new episode is out. Maybe one more when something really good happens. That's the whole deal. We hate a crowded inbox too.

No spam, no selling your address, unsubscribe whenever.