Gail Evans

Evans was born in 17 December 1941 and received a bachelor's degree from Bennington College. Her first job was in Office of the Special Counsel to the President during the Lyndon B. Johnson Administration.[2]

Evans began working at CNN at its inception in 1980. By the time she retired in 2001, she was Executive Vice President of the CNN Newsgroup.[3] During that time she was responsible for program and talent development at all of CNN’s domestic networks overseeing national and international talk shows and the Network Guest Bookings Department,[4] which scheduled about 25,000 guests each year. She is responsible for developing many of CNN’s talk shows including Crossfire, Burden of Proof, Talkback Live, Capital Gang [5] and Crier & Co.[6]

She is credited with helping to discover and guide the careers of Katie Couric[7] and Greta Van Susteren[8]

In 1999, Evans announced she would write a book about the lessons she had learned climbing to the top of the corporate ladder. She met with several publishers and it was estimated that she could get a $500,000 advance to write the book.[5] Play Like a Man, Win Like a Woman came out in September, 2001 and was an instant hit, reaching the top 10 on the New York Times bestseller list and being translated into 21 different languages.[9] Following an appearance on Larry King Live,[10] Evans' book spiked as high as #3 on Amazon.com's bestseller list.[11]

In 2003, Evans wrote a follow-up, She Wins, You Win.[12] Though not as much of a commercial success, the second book got strong reviews. Publishers Weekly described it as, "an aggressive but motivating handbook for women who are serious about career success."[12]

Evans is also a corporate speaker and consultant on women in the workplace, giving lectures to AT&T, Johnson & Johnson, GE, Microsoft, JP Morgan , Morgan Stanley, Wells Fargo, KPMG, Cisco, IBM, Thompson Reuters, Deloitte, Intel , and Wal Mart.[13]

She currently teaches organizational behavior[14] as it relates to gender, race, and ethnicity at Georgia Tech.[2]

Evans was married to former CBS correspondent Bob Evans for more than 30 years before getting divorced in March 2000.[15] They have 3 children and 7 grandchildren.