A real estate executive in New York spent years as the only woman at the table in a male-dominated industry, learning the rules of a game no one had taught her. Her husband, watching her navigate corporate rooms full of men, kept asking pointed questions. Why did you say it that way? Don’t you see how that lands? That was the moment Julie Zuraw started writing down what she was learning.

Years later, Lead Like a Woman is a program she has delivered to female executives around the world, and Julie is now President & CEO of Invest Ahead, the national forum formerly known as the Thirty Percent Coalition, representing over 90 institutional investors, pension funds, asset managers, and private equity firms with more than $8 trillion in assets under management.

But the path there was anything but linear. Julie started her career running the branding division at what is now Publicis, left with a few women to build a consulting practice, then went in-house with a real estate client and ran that company for ten years before running a second New York real estate firm as COO. Large, male-dominated, high-stakes. She figured the game out the hard way, and built the program she wished she’d had.

Today, Julie is leading the organization that pioneered the 30% goal for women on public company boards back in 2011, when only about 12% of US corporate board seats were held by women. The moral argument was obvious. The business case was obvious. But the progress was slow, and in the current climate, some of it is actively being rolled back.

In this episode of Inspiring Women, recorded at the WBL Summit, host Laurie McGraw sits down with Julie Zuraw, President & CEO of Invest Ahead, to talk about what it actually takes to move the needle on boardroom diversity, and what she tells executive women about building real power in rooms that weren’t designed for them.