Author of The Male Factor
Shaunti Feldhahn is a popular public speaker, consultant, research analyst, media commentator, and best-selling author with 2 million copies of her books sold in 20 different languages. She holds a master’s in public policy from Harvard University, and a bachelor’s in government and economics from The College of William & Mary. Prior to becoming an author, she worked in the financial arena on Capitol Hill and later on Wall Street, analyzing the Japanese financial crisis for the highest level decision makers of the Federal Reserve System. She now applies that same skill set to investigating eye-opening truths that many of us tend to miss. Her books on the personal relationship side about what people tend not to get about the opposite sex, have become a staple resource for many marriage counselors. This wife of attorney-entrepreneur Jeff Feldhahn and mother of two, now applies her analytical skills to the startling research of what men and women each privately think in the workplace but rarely share; perceptions that often fundamentally affect their colleagues.
As a popular national speaker and broadcaster, Shaunti travels extensively and has shared her findings with millions of people through conferences, television, the internet, and radio. She has appeared on such diverse media outlets as Fox News, PBS, TNT, Soap Talk, The Alan Colmes Show, and The Today Show. Her weekly opinion column was printed in fifty plus newspapers around the country, including the Chicago Tribune, the Chicago Sun-Times, the Detroit Free Press, the Seattle Times, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and many others in every corner of the country. However, due to the upheaval of the newspaper industry that caused the failure of one hundred newspapers, Shaunti regretfully had to say good-bye to the column.
Today, you can often find Shaunti and her team consulting with leadership groups and companies worldwide about the eye-opening findings of her book, The Male Factor: The Unwritten Rules, Misperceptions and Secret Beliefs of Men in the Workplace. This knowledge has proven to be game-changing for talented, high-potential women in the workplace as well as for men who want to cultivate positive working relationships and champion female players for advancement. Shaunti’s keynotes, leadership consultation and team training sessions are based on more than ten years of research, speaking and consulting with thousands of men and women, as well as groups as diverse as the Government of Singapore, specialized women’s leadership groups, and Fortune 50 household-name corporations.
My Personal Background
First, since everyone asks, let me explain where my name comes from. My parents were Peace Corps volunteers in India before I was born, and my name is the Hindi word for “peace.” Although they came back to the U.S. to have me, my folks returned to India for a year or two when I was small, so my father (a Ph.D. economist) could do a Fullbright Scholarship.
I grew up in the Virginia suburbs of Washington, D.C., where my dad worked at the World Bank, doing groundbreaking development work in many Asian countries. (He actually pioneered a now-common system of bringing together the people who would actually benefit from the massive agricultural development projects – mostly peasant farmers – to have “ownership” of the project and therefore ensure much more effective use.) My mother was a stay-at-home mom with me and my younger brother, and after a family drug-related tragedy, she founded and ran an anti-drug-abuse foundation for a decade. She later became a nurse.
I spent four wonderful years at the College of William and Mary, in colonial Williamsburg, Virginia. I made some lifelong friends there and gained a superb education, majoring in Government and Economics. Because I’m also an outdoorsy person, during three of my college summers, I worked at a dude ranch in the Colorado Rockies – a fun, intense opportunity that did more than anything else to drill a work ethic into me.
After college I landed an incredible job on Capital Hill, working for the U.S. Senate Banking Committee. Because I was there during landmark reform of the financial system, in the wake of the S&L and banking crisis, those years were exhausting but the best possible professional foundation.I then moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts to go to Harvard for graduate school. I got a Master in Public Policy with a concentration in business in 1994, taking all my core classes (and earning my degree from) Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, and taking my electives at Harvard Business School. For those who are wondering, an MPP is an analytical, quantitatively-oriented degree that is a bit like a business degree, but for working with anything in the public interest.
The most important event of those two years was not the great education I got, but the fact that I met my husband, Jeff. On my part at least, I was intrigued at first sight. He’s an absolutely wonderful guy. He graduated a year earlier than I did, and after I graduated we got married and began our life together in New York City, where Jeff proceeded, like all New York lawyers, to work 18-hour days for five years. I took a job that I loved, staying on top of the Japanese financial crisis for the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, but we knew New York was temporary — we wanted kids, and preferred to have them when Jeff could be present in their lives. So we moved to Atlanta.
I almost immediately began writing books, and Jeff worked a few years for a smaller law firm. But it turns out – he’s an entrepreneur at heart. Prior to going to college, he had owned restaurants for eight years with his family near his small farming community in Michigan. But when the restaurants slowed down, Jeff completely changed track and ended up speeding through college in 2 ½ years as valedictorian and going to Harvard Law School. Years after his restaurant ventures and Law practice, he still has the entrepreneurial bug. He has been developing and launching a hi-tech business while practicing law. Between the two of us we are very busy, but whenever we can, I bring one of the kids or sometimes the whole family with me on my trips. We are enjoying life at warp speed.