The Irish American Partnership announced a special grant of $10,000 to Ahalin National School in County Limerick in honor of Limerick native Michael J. Dowling.
Eileen McDonnell, the Chairman & CEO of Penn Mutual Life Insurance Company, discusses her Irish heritage, breaking the glass ceiling, and the way forward.
When parents tell their children that they can do anything, it’s all too often taken with too many grains of salt. But Eileen McDonnell believed her parents. She had no reason not to. And it served her well. When she was applying for a vice president job, a position held by no other women in the company, she brushed off people citing her gender as a reason she wouldn’t get it, telling them that it was irrelevant. They may as well have been saying she was unqualified because she had had chicken for dinner the night before. She knew she could do the job, and that was the only qualification that mattered.