No such thing as having it all: Carolyn McCall's honest case for structural change

It is the kind of line a public-relations adviser would quietly try to soften. Asked in 2019 about the work-and-life balancing act expected of senior women, Dame Carolyn McCall, by then a little over a year into running ITV, and already a veteran of running an airline before that, did not reach for the reassuring script. "The concept of having it all just does not exist," she said.

Coming from almost anyone else, it might read as resignation. Coming from one of the very few women to have been chief executive of two separate FTSE-100 companies, it reads as something rarer: candour earned at the top. McCall has spent four decades climbing, through a newspaper group, an airline, and now a broadcaster mid-reinvention, and she has consistently declined to pretend the climb was frictionless or that good intentions are enough. The myth she punctures with that sentence is the same one she punctures in how she runs a business: that wanting a fairer, more diverse organisation is the same as building one.

A childhood in motion

McCall was born in Bangalore in 1961, the daughter of expatriates whose work kept the family moving across Asia. Her Scottish father ran the Far East division of an American textile multinational; her Irish-born mother worked for the British High Commission in India. She was schooled in India and Singapore into her teens before being sent to a Roman Catholic girls' boarding school in Derbyshire, then read history and politics at the University of Kent.

It is tempting to over-read a peripatetic childhood, but the shape of it is suggestive. A girl raised between cultures, then dropped into an English boarding school, learns early that the rules of any given room are local, contingent and worth questioning, and that belonging is something you construct rather than inherit. It is not a bad apprenticeship for a leader who would later make a public argument about who gets to be in the room at all.

The long climb at the Guardian

McCall joined Guardian Media Group in 1986 and stayed for more than two decades, rising, in the words of Management Today, as "one of the toughest operators to have risen through The Guardian Media Group's ranks." She came up through advertising and commercial roles rather than the newsroom, became chief executive of Guardian Newspapers and then, in 2006, chief executive of the whole group. The reign was not a sleepy one: she oversaw the sale of the Manchester Evening News and a large stake in the Trader Media auto-listings business, hard-headed portfolio decisions that funded the group's loss-making journalism.

It was also at the Guardian that her name became attached to the cause of women in business. In 2008 she was named Veuve Clicquot Business Woman of the Year and appointed OBE for services to women in business, recognition not of a slogan but of years chairing and championing the issue while running a media company.

An airline, an ash cloud, and a reputation

In 2010 McCall did something that surprised the City: she left media for aviation, becoming chief executive of easyJet. The orange budget airline was a famously combustible place, its founder and largest shareholder, Sir Stelios Haji-Ioannou, was an outspoken and frequently critical presence on the share register. McCall's early months were tested almost immediately by the 2010 Eyjafjallajökull volcanic-ash crisis, which grounded European aviation and threw the whole sector into chaos.

What followed was a turnaround that even sceptics struggled to argue with. Over her seven years in charge, easyJet's share price came close to quadrupling, and in 2016 she was appointed Dame Commander of the British Empire for services to the aviation industry. She had crossed industries and won, the kind of move that turns an executive into a name boards call when they need someone who can run anything.

ITV, in the middle of a storm of its own

On 8 January 2018 McCall became chief executive of ITV, the first woman to hold the job, and again an outsider to the industry she was hired to run. The challenge was existential rather than operational: a broadcaster built on mass linear audiences and the advertising they attract, now facing the streaming giants and a generation that did not watch television the way ITV's business model assumed.

Her answer was to commit, publicly and expensively, to a digital-first reinvention. In 2022 ITV launched ITVX, folding its existing on-demand services into a single freemium streaming platform and pledging that much of its new content would premiere there months ahead of the linear channels. "We are supercharging our streaming business," she said at the launch, "fundamentally shifting our focus to think digital first" while still "optimising our broadcast channels." It was a deliberate cannibalisation of the company's own past, the kind of bet that looks obvious only in hindsight, and looks reckless to a nervous board in the moment.

Diversity that is counted, not claimed

Run those three acts together, the newspaper group, the airline, the broadcaster, and a pattern emerges that is more interesting than the CV. McCall is repeatedly handed an institution facing a structural problem and asked to make a structural answer: sell the right assets, fix the cost base, move the whole company to a new platform. Whether the goal is a healthier balance sheet or a fairer organisation, she does not appear to put much faith in good intentions on their own.

"The concept of having it all just does not exist."

That is why the "having it all" line matters beyond its candour. McCall has been consistent that the under-representation of women, and of other groups, in senior leadership is not solved by aspiration, mentoring schemes or warm words at conferences. It is solved the way she solves operational problems: by building the fix into the structure of the organisation and then measuring whether it is working. Targets, data, accountability. The rebuttal to the myth is not despair; it is the refusal to mistake a slogan for a system. If "having it all" is a fantasy that quietly blames individual women for failing to perform an impossible juggle, then the honest alternative is to change the structure that set the impossible terms.

The operator's ethic

It is striking how little of McCall's public reputation rests on charisma or vision-language. She is described, again and again, as tough, commercial and clear-eyed, an operator. The through-line from the Guardian's asset sales to easyJet's turnaround to ITV's streaming bet is not a grand theory of leadership; it is a temperament. Face the hard fact, make the structural change, count the result, and do not flatter yourself or your audience along the way.

That temperament is what gives the "having it all" remark its weight. It would have been easier, and entirely on-brand for a celebrated woman at the top, to offer the encouraging version, to tell younger women that with enough grit the juggle is winnable. McCall declines. The honest thing, she implies, is to stop pretending the system is fair and start rebuilding it so that fewer people have to be superhuman to succeed within it. For a leader who has spent forty years dismantling comfortable stories about declining industries, it is exactly the line you would expect her to refuse to soften.