A Singular Woman - Janny Scott [135]
Barry was “a pretty tough character to deal with,” she told me, looking back on those years with a degree of self-knowledge and candor that was striking. She had grown up in a Catholic family in Orange County, California. One uncle was a priest who had marched with the labor leader César Chávez. A great-aunt was a nun. A graduate of Stanford and Harvard Business School, Barry had worked in Tanzania for McKinsey & Company, the management consulting firm, before going to work for the World Bank for fifteen years. At Women’s World Banking, she was bent on results. She took dissent personally. Small things—say, the wrong word in a business plan—could set her off. She felt she had to manage everyone—the funders, the board, the affiliates. “It wasn’t like Women’s World Banking was the leader of the network,” she told me. “I was the leader of the network. So I was like the big brain, and everybody else was feeding into the big brain.” Younger women on the staff, swept up in the mission, tended not to challenge Barry. “If you’re a young twenty-five-year-old and you’re working with somebody that is working on something supercompelling, with unbelievably interesting people and with a mission to die for, you’re a net learner, so you’re kind of into it for at least ten years,” Barry said. “By the time you get ten years into it, hopefully you actually know that I’m a good-hearted person and you’ve learned how to manage me. But for Ann, who was also very strong-headed and strong-willed, I think it was not fun.”
Ann was not afraid to take on Barry. She had little patience with the shorthand that is useful and necessary in corporate life for selling an idea, and she was unwilling to make any claim—about, say, loan repayment rates and women—without the data to back it up. She preferred to acknowledge what was not known, then go find the answer. “She would sell an idea by saying, ‘Well, we don’t know the answer. That’s why it’s important that you fund us,’” Nayar remembered. “There was no halfway. In the business of development, academics have a very limited role. You can’t indulge in spending weeks and months on research. Oftentimes, deadlines are what we’re led by. Ann didn’t live by those rules. She would say, ‘If I have to get this thing ready, I am going to research it, I’m not just going to give you sound-bite stuff. If it’s got my name on it, it has to be right.’ It used to drive us crazy. We had to push Ann to do something. There would be much ‘Oh, c’mon, Ann. Get it over with.’ But I understand. She would never produce anything that she was not proud of.”
The confrontations between Ann and Barry became, to Nayar, the clash of the Titans. “I had the luxury of being in on all their meetings,” she said. “It was horrible. I can understand Nancy, because I’m very much a can-do, will-do, do-it-now person. But I also related to Mother Ann.” Barry needed justification for the policy statements the organization was making. “For instance, ‘Women are good clients.’ Okay, what are the ways that we can prove that?” Nayar said. “Ann would want to write a dissertation. And Nancy just wants, like, ‘For example, boom, boom, boom.’” According to Nayar, “Ann would say, ‘I can’t whip things together into nonsensical bullet points. I need to have justifications for all my bullet points. So that’s a paragraph!’ And Nancy says, ‘Cut it down, cut it down.’” Colleagues joked that Ann had been in Asia too long. She had a different sense of time, and instead of arguing, she preferred to debate or discuss. Over time, it seemed to Nayar, the conflict forced Ann to become more confrontational and assertive. “Both are demonic once they get on their high horse,” Nayar said. “God can’t turn them around. It was just two very strong women.”
At other times, Ann seemed