Posted on March 23, 2026

Think about the last event you attended. Really think about it.

The name on the programme. The order of the sessions. Who got the opening keynote and who got the 4pm slot on the last day? Who was on the panels, and who was in the audience? Who got invited, and who didn’t hear about it until it was over.

None of that was accidental. Somebody wrote the agenda. Somebody decided what mattered. Somebody chose whose voice would fill the room and whose would wait outside.

The gathering — the conference, the summit, the forum, the gala — has always been a mechanism of power. And the women in this article understood that before the rest of the industry caught up. Some of them used it to change laws. Some used it to save lives. Some used it to set the professional standard for how a corporation presents itself to the world. Some are still using it, right now, at scale.

This is the second article in our Women Who Built the Room series. The first went back to the hospitality pioneers,  the women who built the luxury, the infrastructure, and the executive pipeline of hotels. This one goes somewhere different.

This is about the people who understood that the room itself was never the point. The agenda was the point. And they were going to write it.

A. The Architects of Consequence

They used the gathering as a weapon. And they were right to.

Long before there was an events industry to speak of — before strategic meetings management, before PCMA, before a single convention centre had been built — some women already knew what a well-organised public gathering could do. Not as a networking opportunity. Not as a brand activation:

1. Ida B. Wells (1862–1931) – Journalist, Co-Founder of the NAACP

On June 1, 1909, Ida B. Wells stood at a podium at the National Negro Conference in New York City and delivered a speech called ‘Lynching, Our National Crime.’ The room was full of reformers, journalists, and civic leaders. She had travelled across the country and across the Atlantic — twice — to get people into rooms like this one. She had given this speech, or versions of it, more times than she could count.

She was not speaking to sympathisers. She was building a record. Organising a coalition. Turning outrage into infrastructure.

Ida B. Wells understood something that most event professionals spend entire careers trying to articulate: that the gathering itself is the intervention. She had learned this the hard way. In 1892, the office of her Memphis newspaper, the Free Speech, was destroyed by a mob after she published an editorial exposing the reality of lynching. She was run out of the city. What she did next — the lecture tours, the pamphlets distributed at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition to more than 20,000 people, the international speaking engagements in Britain where she reached white audiences the American press refused to address — was essentially a content and events strategy in service of a movement.

She helped found the NAACP in 1909. She co-founded the National Association of Colored Women in 1896. She established the Alpha Suffrage Club, the first Black women’s voting rights group in Chicago. Every single one was built on the same principle: get the right people in a room, with the right information, at the right moment, and you change the outcome.

In 2020 — nearly ninety years after her death — Ida B. Wells was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for her journalism. The prize citation read: ‘for her outstanding and courageous reporting on the horrific and vicious violence against African Americans during the era of lynching.’ She had been right about everything, including the power of the room.

2. Eleanor Roosevelt (1884–1962) – First Chair, UN Commission on Human Rights

In April 1946, Eleanor Roosevelt walked into a gym at Hunter College in the Bronx, New York, for the first session of the United Nations’ nuclear commission on human rights. She had been appointed to the US delegation by President Truman less than a year after her husband’s death. She was the only woman in the room. She was unanimously elected chair.

Over the next two years, she chaired more than 3,000 hours of deliberation between 18 nations with no common conception of citizenship, government, politics, property, or religion. Cold War politics threatened to derail the process. The Soviet bloc argued. American conservatives warned of socialism. Saudi Arabia objected to articles on marriage and religion. Eleanor Roosevelt held the room together.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights was adopted on December 10, 1948. Forty-eight countries voted in favour. None voted against.

When she presented it to the UN General Assembly, she said it ‘may well become the international Magna Carta of all men everywhere.’ President Truman called her the First Lady of the World. The Declaration has since been translated into more than 500 languages. It forms the foundation of international human rights law. It appears in the constitutions of scores of nations.

She later wrote that the Human Rights Commission work was what she considered her most important task during her UN years. And she had been First Lady of the United States for twelve years.

What Eleanor Roosevelt ran, in its most stripped-back form, was the most consequential international event in modern history. And she ran it because she was the best person in the room for the job.

B. The Standard-Setters

One gave corporate events a spine. The other gave the profession its conscience.

By the middle of the twentieth century, the conference and the corporate event had become serious business. The question was no longer whether gatherings mattered — that had been settled. The question was: what should they look like? Who should run them? And what did it mean to do the job well?

Two women answered that question from very different directions. One started in the White House and ended up on the cover of Time magazine. The other started in an Ohio art museum and ended up in the Events Industry Council’s Hall of Leaders. Together, they set the standard for what professional corporate event work actually means.

3. Letitia Baldrige (1926–2012) – “The Doyenne of Decorum.”

In 1960, Letitia Baldrige left her job as the first female executive at Tiffany & Co. to help her old friend Jacqueline Bouvier — now about to become First Lady of the United States — run the social operations of the Kennedy White House.

She was thirty-four years old, six feet one inch tall, and had already served in the US embassy in both Paris and Rome. She was, in every sense, the most prepared person for the job that didn’t officially exist yet.

What she built in the Kennedy White House was not just a series of state dinners — though she ran those too, including the legendary evenings that turned the East Room into a cultural salon, hosting Nobel laureates, artists, and heads of state with a combination of grandeur and warmth that had never been seen in Washington before. What she really built was a methodology. A way of thinking about how an institution presents itself through its gatherings. A standard.

After leaving the White House in 1963, she took that standard into corporate America. She founded Letitia Baldrige Enterprises and spent the next four decades teaching executives that the way you conduct yourself at a dinner, a boardroom meeting, a corporate reception — the way your organisation hosts people — is not peripheral to your work. It is your work, made visible.

In 1985 she published Letitia Baldrige’s Complete Guide to Executive Manners. It sold half a million copies worldwide and went through sixteen printings. She appeared on the cover of Time, which called her America’s leading arbiter of manners. She published twenty books in total. She trained executives at companies across the country on what professional corporate entertaining actually looked like, and why it mattered.

What Letitia Baldrige understood — and what she spent her career communicating — was that the event is the institution’s character made physical. You cannot separate the two. She translated that insight from the East Room of the White House to the boardrooms of corporate America, and the industry has been working with that framework ever since.

4. Joan Eisenstodt – Founder, Eisenstodt Associates, LLC — inducted into the Events Industry Council Hall of Leaders

Joan Eisenstodt moved to Washington DC in 1978 and spent three years as a meeting planner for an association. Before that, she had coordinated events for an art museum in Ohio. On June 1, 1981, she founded Eisenstodt Associates, LLC, a DC-based meeting consulting, facilitation, and training company.

That is the factual sequence of events. The actual story is something else.

What Joan Eisenstodt recognised — and recognised early, before the industry had any formal infrastructure to address it — was that corporate meeting planning had a serious problem with its own professional identity. There were no widely adopted ethics standards. There was a culture of supplier gifts and hospitality perks that blurred the line between professional judgment and personal benefit. There were no agreed frameworks for contracts, negotiations, or risk management. The role was often invisible within organisations, its practitioners treated as logistics coordinators rather than strategic professionals.

She decided to fix that.

She served four years on the Board of Directors of Meeting Professionals International, active in MPI since 1979 — an era when the organisation was still finding its feet. She founded the MPI Student and Faculty Committee. She served on the ASAE Ethics Committee. She contributed to the 9th CIC Manual, which provides the framework for the CMP (Certified Meeting Professional) qualification. She was named MPI International Planner of the Year in 1991. She was named PCMA Teacher of the Year in 1992. The PCMA Foundation later honoured her with a Lifetime Achievement Award as an Educator. She was inducted into the Events Industry Council Hall of Leaders — the industry’s highest honour.

She also became the industry’s most visible voice on ethics. Not in a comfortable, conference-circuit way. She was specific, rigorous, and unsparing. She argued publicly that hotel loyalty points earned on a client’s event should not be kept by the planner. She said that anyone who claims gifts from suppliers don’t influence their decisions is not telling the truth. She insisted the profession could only earn a seat at the strategic table if it held itself to a professional standard.

‘People need to understand that our industry needs to look more professional,’ she said. ‘This reflects on all of us.’

In 2023, she joined the Board of Advisors of Travel Unity, continuing her decades-long work in equity and inclusion in the events space. She is still the sharpest ethics voice in the room. She has been for forty years.

C. The Craft-Builders

The women doing the day-to-day work of advancing what the profession can be.

The headline-makers get the profiles. But every industry is also built by the people who show up every day and do the actual work — the ones who write the books, build the tools, run the events, train the next generation, and keep asking what the profession should look like next.

These four women are doing exactly that, and doing it visibly.

5. Tahira Endean, MSc, CMP – Author, Intentional Event Design · Instructor, BCIT

In 2017, Tahira Endean published Intentional Event Design: Our Professional Opportunity. It is not a logistics manual. It is a philosophical argument for what the corporate event profession should actually be.

Her central premise is deceptively simple: every element of an event should be a decision, not a default. The room layout, the session format, the food, the lighting, the schedule — all of it communicates something about what you think your attendees need. Most events communicate, at best, that someone forgot to think about it.

Tahira had entered the events industry three decades earlier with diplomas in event management and adult education, and later added an MSc in Creativity and Change Leadership. She has designed events on three continents. She teaches Special Event Planning and Sustainable Event Management at the British Columbia Institute of Technology. She was inducted into the Meetings Canada Hall of Fame. She was named one of the Top 5 Women in Event Technology in 2015.

Her book was updated in 2022 with post-pandemic insights, and it remains one of the most-cited practical frameworks in the professional development conversation for corporate planners.

What Tahira Endean did was give the profession a vocabulary for intent. Before her, planners could describe what they did. After her, they could articulate why — and hold themselves accountable to that answer.

6. Felicia Asiedu – European Marketing Director, Cvent · Co-Founder, Diverse Speaker Bureau

When Felicia Asiedu talks about the problem with diversity on event stages, she does not do it diplomatically. She has said, publicly, that she spent a period of her career saying yes to every panel invitation simply because she was a Black woman and the organiser needed to look more diverse. And she has said, just as publicly, that it was the wrong approach — not because diversity panels are wrong, but because putting the wrong person on a stage in the name of representation does not help anyone, least of all the community you are supposedly representing.

That honesty is the thread that runs through everything she does.

Felicia is European Marketing Director at Cvent, where she leads strategy across the continent and runs Cvent CONNECT Europe, one of the flagship events in the European events calendar. She is one of the co-founders of the Diverse Speaker Bureau — winner of the M&IT Award — an organisation built on the conviction that diverse voices should be on stages because they are the best people for those stages, not as a diversity quota.

She is a FastForward15 Diversity Ambassador, a member of Cvent’s internal Diversity and Inclusion Council, and a co-host of Cvent’s Great Events podcast. She speaks regularly across the industry on marketing, events technology, and DE&I.

Her work is about closing a specific gap: the gap between organisations that want their events to reflect the world and organisations that actually know how to make that happen. She is one of the clearest voices on what the difference looks like in practice.

7. Nina Froriep – Founder, Clock Work Productions, NYC

Nina Froriep has been producing corporate events in New York for over two decades, and her particular contribution to the profession is something the industry often overlooks: translation.

Not language translation — though her multicultural background informs much of her work — but the translation between the language of corporate strategy and the language of event production. The gap between what an executive says they want from an event and what that actually looks like on the floor is, in many organisations, enormous. Nina’s work has consistently been about closing that gap, particularly for corporate planners who are navigating the production side of events without a production background.

She founded Clock Work Productions in New York with a focus on corporate event production and has spent her career demystifying the technical and logistical machinery of events for clients and planners who need to understand it, not just outsource it.

Her value to the field is practical and direct: she makes the complex navigable. And in a profession where the mystification of production knowledge has historically been a barrier to entry, that is a meaningful contribution.

8. Sandy Biback, CSEP – Founder, Imagination+ Event Management

Sandy Biback has spent decades doing two things simultaneously: producing events, and teaching others how to produce them.

As a Certified Special Events Professional (CSEP) and the founder of Imagination+ Event Management in Canada, she has trained hundreds of corporate planners across North America — not through a university programme, but through direct, practical instruction grounded in real-world experience.

The significance of that is easy to underestimate. The corporate events profession in North America developed without a strong formal education infrastructure for most of its history. The people who built the field’s institutional knowledge were often practitioners who chose to pass it on, formally or informally, to the next generation. Sandy Biback is one of those people. The planners she has trained are now producing events, running departments, and training others in turn.

The profession has a body of practical knowledge. Sandy Biback is one of the reasons it got written down and passed on.

D. The Room at Scale

When the programme runs to 35,000 meetings a year, the agenda question becomes something else entirely.

There is a version of event planning that operates at a scale most people never encounter. Not one conference, not one gala season — but a global programme, running continuously, across hundreds of clients or properties or stakeholders, generating millions of data points a year. This is where corporate events intersect with corporate strategy in the most direct way.

The women running these programmes are not planners in the traditional sense. They are executives who happen to work in events, and the distinction matters.

9. Yma Sherry – Vice President, North America — American Express Meetings & Events

Yma Sherry leads a team of 500 meeting planners serving large-cap corporate clients across the US, Mexico, Argentina, and Colombia. Her team plans approximately 35,000 meetings annually and books six million hotel rooms a year.

Read that again. Six million hotel rooms.

Her work at American Express Meetings & Events has consistently pushed the programme in two directions at once: toward more rigorous data strategy, and toward more intentional supplier diversity. Both matter, and the fact that they are advancing in tandem under her leadership is not a coincidence.

On the data side, her team operates at a scale where every decision — venue selection, contract terms, attendee logistics — generates analytical signal. The challenge is not collecting the data. It is making it usable, and making sure organisations are actually asking the questions that the data can answer.

On the diversity side, she has been part of the push to embed supplier diversity requirements directly into the sourcing and RFP process — not as a separate initiative, but as a standard part of how her team evaluates options. At the scale Amex M&E operates, that structural shift has real consequences for which businesses get the work.

10. Vivian Eickhoff, CMM – General Manager, Event Production & Studios — Microsoft

In 2015, Microsoft made a decision that would have seemed counterintuitive to most events organisations: it took six separate major conferences and consolidated them into one. That event was Microsoft Ignite. Vivian Eickhoff helped build it from the beginning.

She is now General Manager of Microsoft’s Event Production & Studios team, with over 25 years of experience in event marketing. Microsoft Ignite regularly draws tens of thousands of attendees and is one of the most complex corporate events produced anywhere in the world — not just in scale, but in the coordination required between product teams, marketing, external partners, and production.

In September 2017, two weeks before Ignite was scheduled to open in Orlando with 26,000 registered attendees, Hurricane Irma swept through the city. Vivian Eickhoff’s team kept the event on. It was a great success. In the aftermath of the storm, attendees built more than 2,000 hygiene kits for disaster relief and donated over 1,000 conference packs to affected communities.

That story is notable not because a hurricane happened, but because of what the response reveals about her leadership: the event held its shape under pressure and found a way to serve the community it landed in.

She has been honoured with the Event Marketer B2B Dream Team award and serves on advisory boards across the industry. She is one of the people who has, quietly and methodically, demonstrated what world-class corporate event production looks like at a technology company.

11. Tracy Folkes Hanson, CAE – President & CEO, Canadian Society of Association Executives

Associations are a particular beast. They are simultaneously member organisations, advocacy bodies, professional development platforms, and event producers — and the people who run them have to be fluent in all four modes at once. Tracy Folkes Hanson runs the Canadian Society of Association Executives, which means she runs the organisation that helps all the other organisations run better.

Her contribution to the events story is specifically about how she has pushed the association world to think differently about its gatherings. Not just as annual conferences and membership renewals, but as year-round engagement platforms that reflect the full spectrum of the communities they serve. That means taking EDI seriously not as a programme add-on, but as a structural question about who is in the room and who is running it.

She leads CSAE’s CEO roundtables on equity, diversity, and inclusion — the sessions where association leaders come together to share, honestly, where they are in the process and what they still don’t know how to do.

In an industry where the temptation is always to treat the annual conference as the product rather than the community, Tracy Folkes Hanson is one of the people keeping the sector honest about what it is actually supposed to be building.

12. Artesha Moore, FASAE, CAE – President & CEO, Association Forum

Association Forum — founded in Chicago in 1916 — is, as its own description has it, ‘the association of associations.’ When Artesha Moore was appointed its President and CEO in 2022, she was inheriting an organisation whose entire purpose is to make the association community better at what it does.

She came with more than twenty years of association management experience, a CAE designation, a fellowship from ASAE, and a specific expertise in membership, engagement, and DEI that she had been building since the late nineties. She had a reputation, across every organisation she had worked for, for identifying people whose voices were not being heard and creating the structural conditions for them to lead.

That is, in the end, what she has brought to Association Forum: a framework for thinking about who gets to participate in the association community’s events, conversations, and leadership pipelines — and what it actually takes to change that, beyond programmes and pledges.

Notably, when she took the role, she thanked her predecessor Michelle Mason specifically for paving the way for women of color in the association industry. The acknowledgment was deliberate. These things don’t happen without the people who came before.

Artesha Moore is building the infrastructure that helps associations build better infrastructure. At that level of abstraction, the events that get produced, the communities that get convened, and the conversations that get had — all of it flows from this work.

E. The Mission-Driven

When the event is not the end. It is the means.

There is a category of event professionals who are not primarily in the events business. They are in the cause business, the health business, the community business — and events are the most powerful tool they have.

These three women have spent their careers understanding that distinction, and doing something precise and intentional with it.

13. Katrina McGhee – EVP & CMO, American Heart Association

In her first stint at the American Heart Association, Katrina McGhee created a campaign called Take Wellness to Heart — the organisation’s first national campaign focused specifically on women’s heart health. That campaign laid the groundwork for what became Go Red for Women, which has since transformed public awareness of heart disease risk among women across the United States.

Go Red for Women is, at its core, an events platform. The luncheons, the galas, the awareness walks — the live gatherings that turn an abstract health statistic into a community experience, a conversation, a commitment. Katrina McGhee built the strategic foundation for that platform. Then she left the AHA, went to Susan G. Komen for the Cure, and did it again.

At Komen, she was EVP and CMO, responsible for global marketing and over 140 Race for the Cure Series events annually — helping raise more than $350 million in revenue. She oversaw more than 200 corporate partnerships and built a national events machine in service of a medical mission.

She returned to the AHA in 2020. She is also a best-selling author, an award-winning podcast host, and — in an interesting turn — has built a parallel career as a career break and sabbatical coach, helping mid-career professionals design intentional breaks from their careers. The woman who built some of the most successful recurring event programmes in American non-profit history has a second career built on the radical idea that rest is also a strategy.

What Katrina McGhee demonstrates throughout is that the event is not the point. The outcome is the point. The event is just the best mechanism she has found for getting there.

14. Amy Halpern-Laff – Executive Director, Non-Profit Events Network

Most of the organisations in the non-profit sector do not have large events budgets. They do not have dedicated event teams. They have an executive director, a small staff, an ambitious mission, and a gala they have to plan every year that will generate a meaningful portion of their annual revenue.

For twenty years, Amy Halpern-Laff has been the person in the room who helps them figure out how to make that work. As Executive Director of the Non-Profit Events Network, she has spent her career at the specific intersection of events and impact — helping non-profit organisations maximise what a well-designed gathering can do when they cannot afford to waste a single dollar or a single hour of their audience’s attention.

The skills that matter most in this context are not production skills. They are strategic skills: How does this event serve the mission? What is the ask? What is the follow-through? How do you create the kind of experience that turns an attendee into a donor, and a donor into an advocate?

Amy Halpern-Laff has been answering those questions for two decades, at a scale where it genuinely matters — not for Fortune 500 companies, but for the organisations doing the work that larger institutions tend to overlook.

15. Sarah Soliman – Founder, Soliman Productions

Sarah Soliman produces high-end fundraising galas and advocacy events for prominent US charities. Her events raise millions annually for the organisations she works with.

The fundraising gala is one of the most demanding formats in the event portfolio — because it has to do multiple things at once. It has to be beautiful enough that people want to attend. It has to be emotionally compelling enough that they want to give. It has to be logistically seamless enough that it does not get in its own way. And it has to generate real revenue, in real time, in a room full of people who have other places to be.

Sarah Soliman has built a practice on doing exactly that, for organisations whose missions depend on it. The causes are serious. The budgets are real. The stakes — for the organisations and the communities they serve — are high.

There is a version of events work that is fundamentally about aesthetics and logistics. And then there is the version where what happens in the room directly affects whether a programme gets funded or a community gets served. Sarah Soliman operates in the second version. Every time.

F. The Agenda Was Always Theirs

Somewhere right now, in a conference room or a convention centre or a hotel ballroom that smells faintly of fresh linen and coffee, someone is writing an agenda.

They are deciding what gets said first. Who gets to speak? Which voices fill the room, and which ones wait for the next time? They are, in the most literal sense, determining what the gathering means.

That work has a history. It runs from Ida B. Wells distributing pamphlets to 20,000 people at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition, through Eleanor Roosevelt holding 3,000 hours of deliberation between 18 nations until they agreed on the rights of every human being on earth. It runs through Letitia Baldrige, turning the Kennedy White House into the template for institutional hospitality and then spending forty years teaching corporate America what that template meant. It runs through Joan Eisenstodt deciding, in 1981, that a profession cannot demand a seat at the strategic table without first holding itself to a strategic standard.

And it runs right up to today — to Felicia Asiedu, co-founding a speaker bureau because she got tired of being a diversity quota, to Tahira Endean writing the book that gave the profession a language for intent, to Vivian Eickhoff running one of the most complex corporate events in the world with the kind of rigour that turns a hurricane into a community relief effort. To Katrina McGhee, turning a health awareness campaign into an annual event series that has genuinely changed what women know about their own hearts. To Artesha Moore, building the frameworks that make the entire association ecosystem more inclusive and more capable.

The gathering is never neutral. Someone writes the agenda.

These women have been writing it for longer than most people realise. And the events you attend, the conferences that shaped your career, the galas that funded the causes you care about — they are built, in ways both visible and invisible, on that work.

So here is our question for you, the same one we asked at the end of our first article in this series:

Who wrote the agenda for the event that changed something for you? Who put you in the right room at the right time? Who built the conference that gave you your first speaking slot, your first big client, the connection that opened the door? Tag her. Name her. Tell the story in the comments.