Emerging leaders

Rising Starawards recognize emerging leaders who have promoted programs or initiatives advancing women. Crain’s editors chose ve nalists to honor.

Carey Shu man UBS

Executive Director, head of Women's Segment

JESSICA TISCH Commissioner, New York City Department of Sanitation

WHEN JESSICA TISCH took over as commissioner of the Department of Sanitation last year, basic cleaning protocols such as street sweeping had been reduced during the pandemic, a development that only served to shame New York as a trashy city.

REACH: $1.9 billion budget

WHAT’S NEXT: Introducing citywide composting

One of her rst moves was to launch “restore and more,” reinstating the services cut due to the pandemic and enhancing and expanding them where possible. A force of 200 sanitation workers is designated to regularly clean “no-man’s lands.” ose are the parts of the city that were never cleaned before, such as underpasses. More than that, starting in April, trash set-out and pickup times will change for residential buildings to reduce the amount of time trash sits on the curb.

“Twenty-four million pounds of trash on the curb 14 hours a day is a big contributor to the griminess feeling in the city,” Tisch said. “If we make [the trash] disappear faster, it will make the city feel meaningfully di erent.”

Next up are a citywide composting program, which proved successful in a pilot program in Queens, that’s soon to be available to all residents; a commercial waste zone program that licenses carters to operate in one of 20 zones, rather than all over the city, polluting and tying up tra c; and a feasibility study of containerization, which, if implemented, would do away with the piles of bags on the curb.

Tisch has introduced the kind of tech savvy she used in previous jobs. As commissioner of the Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications, she created a citywide Covid vaccination system. Before that, as deputy commissioner of information for the New York Police Department, she implemented a “domain awareness” system that transmits information from 911 calls directly to o cers’ phones and desktops along with any history of the department’s interaction with the location involved in the call.

Among her tech rsts at the Sanitation Department was the installation of cameras and license plate readers at vacant lots that have become illegal dumping grounds, creating eyesores and health hazards. All street sweepers now have GPS, and the department is using data, such as 311 calls, to make operations decisions.

For Tisch, leadership has been all about getting into the minutia.

“In government, I have really worked very much in the weeds, understanding where the bureaucratic logjam may be,” she said. “A lot of the success my teams and I have had is because we very much focus not on setting policy, but on the weeds and implementation.”

Carey Shuffman is changing the way women interact with money at investment bank and nancial services company UBS and throughout the industry. Shuffman, head of the company’s Women’s Segment, is regarded as a subject matter expert on women and economic well-being, and she was recently selected to serve on the UBS Americas Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Council.

With a erce devotion to increasing women’s nancial engagement, Shuffman has built a team that furthers its impact through the training it has conducted, the events it has hosted and the innovative research it has published, including ve annual reports that led to the creation of a nancial education website that’s dedicated to women and free to the public.

Throughout Shuffman’s career, most of her mentors and sponsors have been women. That has played a role in her professional success and her understanding of the need to nurture a culture where women receive equal opportunities.

From pursuing partnerships with the Luminary Fellowship Program to help women-of- color business owners affected by the pandemic to teaming up with female founders’ network Fylí to address the challenges faced by female entrepreneurs, Shuffman and her team are making great strides to champion women.

Roxanne Petraeus

Ethena

Co-founder, CEO

Roxanne Petraeus is a U.S. Army combat veteran and former consultant whose experiences in elds where women were few and far between inspired her to “be the change” and co-found the compliance training platform Ethena.

As a female CEO in the human relations and compliance industry, Petraeus built Ethena to move companies beyond discussing diversity, equity and inclusion and drive action to break through the underlying roadblocks preventing underrepresented individuals from accelerating.

More than 70,000 active monthly users have completed training activities on the platform at a rate that’s two times faster than the industry standard, the company said.

With an awareness that prob- lems cannot be solved if they're not talked about and understood, Petraeus says part of her mission as a company leader is to share her experiences and call out inequities. By being transparent and acknowledging these hurdles, she inspires more women to share their stories and nd solutions together.

Petraeus’ commitment to progressing diversity is re ected in the makeup of Ethena’s leadership team, which is 75% female and 25% Black. Women make up 75% of Ethena’s board of directors.

Danielle Cohen-Shohet GlossGenius Founder, CEO

With GlossGenius, Danielle Cohen-Shohet created a software- ntech platform that enables tens of thousands of female beauty and wellness entrepreneurs across the U.S. to do what they thought they couldn’t—run their own businesses.

Cohen-Shohet’s inspiration came from experiencing the pain points of working a full-time job while pursuing her passion for makeup artistry on the side. She knew this was a struggle many women could relate to, so she leveraged her nance skills, taught herself how to code, and developed an innovative solution that propels female business leaders.

As the business and technical founder of GlossGenius and its CEO, Cohen-Shohet has invented a powerful product that assists with many aspects of beauty and wellness entrepreneurship. One particular functionality was devised to help working women “do it all”: Through automated technology, business owners can spend less time handling administrative tasks and more time focusing on their personal lives.

Cohen-Shohet has built a leadership team that is more than 50% female.

The organization NYC FinTech Women named her to its list of Inspiring FinTech Females of 2022.

Claire Liu Yang

Silicon Harlem Chief of sta

Silicon Harlem’s Claire Liu Yang is an emerging leader who demonstrates that female leadership can transcend social stigmas and shatter barriers. With a passion for building infrastructure that’s blind to gender, age, income, race and disabilities, the chief of staff manages the broadband that provides internet service for affordable housing in underserved communities.

“When our partners and con-

BY LAUREN DEFAZIO

tractors ask for our broadband manager so they can talk to ‘him,’ I enjoy directing them to talk to her—Claire. I’m proud of the fact that a woman is running our broadband program in the telecommunication industry that is usually dominated by men,” said Clayton Banks, Silicon Harlem’s CEO.

As co-chair of the technology committee of the New York metropolitan chapter of the American Planning Association, Liu Yang has produced and moderated a series of APA panels focused on female leaders in equitable technologies.

Liu Yang has mentored special-needs interns from the Cooke School and encouraged girls to discover their passion for technology through the city’s Summer Youth Employment Program.

“Claire’s impactful leadership as a champion for women is laid down brick by brick in the infrastructure she builds and word by word in the youths she mentors,” colleague Anthony Seruwagi said.

Danyelle Simmons

Turner Construction Company

Estimating engineer

As a Black woman in a traditionally patriarchal industry, Danyelle Simmons recognizes challenges, such as unconscious bias, glass ceilings and a lack of mentors, and aims to diminish them.

She accomplishes this as a project engineer at Turner Construction and as a founder and board lead of Building Voices, an internal organization with a mission to host an encouraging culture and supply resources for African American employees who wish to advance in their careers.

Among her initiatives, Simmons piloted a Coffee Chat Mentorship Program where senior and junior-level staff are partnered for support, and she guided a General Manager Panel Series to facilitate open dialogue, including on how women are promoted within the industry.

Simmons looked at Turner’s employee bene ts through a gender-equity lens and recommended improvements for women’s reproductive health care.

Simmons developed a partnership with Turner and Women in Need NYC, the largest provider of shelter and supportive housing for the city’s homeless families. Working within the partnership, she organized a clothing drive and a résumé workshop for women.