Why does it matter that Joanna Geraghty became CEO of JetBlue Airways?

What is the difference between a president and a CEO? Not many of us know that. In fact, many see the two roles as essentially the same: the highest ranking person in an organization. In reality, the difference between president and CEO is significant.

According to Workable a CEO “is the top executive, responsible for high-level decisions and setting company vision,” while a president “oversees day-to-day operations, supervises managers, and ensures departments function properly, facilitating the company’s vision and culture.” In other words, the president is still doing the day-to-day operations.

Why is that important? Because when you are running an airline, the day-to-day operations mean that you need to hit the on-time departure goals of your fleet every day, so your ranking does not dip with Department of Transportation (DOT). The official definition of On-Time Departure means “flights are on-time if they depart from the gate or arrive at the gate less than 15 minutes after their scheduled departure or arrival time.”

And why does that matter? Because, as the president of an airline, you still have to wake up every morning and look at your phone to see if you had a good fleet launch. Did all your FIRST flights for the day leave on time? Because if they did not, and you are a Point-to-Point airline like JetBlue Airways, that means your whole day will be off. Think of the domino that you keep trying to catch, and it keeps falling. In the industry we call it “rolling delay.”

Why am I telling you all of this? To put in context what happened this week when Joanna Geraghty became the CEO of JetBlue Airways. From February on, Joanna Geraghty’s days will no longer be tied to the on-time departure metric as they have been for the past several years. And that is HUGE. There is a tremendous difference between a president and a CEO of an airline, and we just gave the biggest non-operational role to a woman in the US.

As I grew my career, I realized the most important conversations happen when people discuss policy and when governments and their agencies discuss policy. These are the rooms where long lasting, meaningful impact happens. These are the decisions that impact decades.

I will never forget when I watched the Ruth Bader Ginsburg movie On the Basis of Sex. When she makes her final argument for the Supreme Court to change the law, one of the judges tells her that the word “woman” does not appear even once in the US Constitution. I was triggered by that as an immigrant, who came to America for freedom and equality. Last year, I went again to Philadelphia with my mother and realized that the Declaration of Independence ALSO does not have the word “woman” in it. This is the significance of the JetBlue announcement this week. We put a woman in a role that will be part of legislative conversations and structural decisions in America that hopefully will make a difference in the lives of millions women. No pressure, Joanna!

In 2019, the International Air Transport Association (IATA), the leading association in the industry, launched 25by2025, a global initiative to enhance diversity, equity, inclusion and gender balance across aviation. It earned more than 200 signatories. As of 2022, IATA reported twenty-eight women in CEO roles and 5% of all pilots.

We have more work to do for sure. But today is a good day, as we celebrate another historical moment in US Aviation when a woman was given a seat at new tables. A woman that is a lawyer, an aviator, a mother, and above all, a CEO.