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- Flying high. In February, Joanna Geraghty became the CEO of JetBlue. The promotion made the JetBlue veteran the first female CEO to lead a major U.S. airline. But to Geraghty, what could be called both a career and industry milestone is instead all about the business.
"It means that I've got to deliver," she told me last month at a luncheon for Concern Worldwide U.S., a nonprofit she chairs. "It's about results."
Geraghty warned in JetBlue's first-quarter earnings call, her first as CEO, that the company would miss investor expectations this year as competitors pour into Latin America, a critical region for the airline. In March, JetBlue terminated its planned merger with Spirit Airlines after a judge blocked the $3.8 billion deal. Its stock is down 36% over the past year. The airline's priority is a return to profitability. With those headwinds, it's perhaps unsurprising that Geraghty is focused on the business rather than the significance of her promotion.
Still, she acknowledges that a female CEO is meaningful in a historically male-dominated industry. "It was a function of, historically, you'd have a pilot who would leave the pilot ranks to become a leader. Pilots were mostly out of the military and it was mostly male. It's a more technical industry," she explains. "That led to a world where there were just a lot of men in the industry."
Today, 6% of commercial airline pilots are women. "As women become mothers, the lifestyle is more challenging. You have a lot of trips overnight, you're away from your family," she says. "We're working hard to bend that curve, but it is very, very slow."
Geraghty got into the airline industry through her first career as an attorney; she represented airlines and aircraft manufacturers. She took what she calls a "leap of faith" to JetBlue in 2005, first as its director of litigation and regulatory affairs. Since then, she's served as chief people officer, COO, and EVP for customer experience before becoming CEO.
"The leap of faith is taking a chance on something that you might not be comfortable doing," she says. "If you're focused on delivering, the other good things will come."
Emma Hinchliffe
emma.hinchliffe@fortune.com
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