Unprecedented Times, (Very) Unprecedented Women
With the 11th annual Wharton Women in Business Conference kicking off tomorrow, you can count on some of the biggest (female) names in business to be heeling through the halls of the Park Hyatt for the “Unprecedented Times, Unprecedented Women” themed event.
The star-studded agenda includes Bank of America division president Sallie Krawcheck, Ogilvy & Mather Chairwoman Shelly Lazarus, Goldman Sachs Senior Advisor Laura Liswood and…Julia Allison, Co-Founder of the Website NonSociety.com.
Hold up—Julia Allison?
Really? You might as well have slapped Philadelphia sleaze ball Arthur Kade next to Robert De Niro for a panel on acting.
Here’s what they say about the self-described “media personality” and perpetual navel-gazer:
New York Magazine named her “the most famous young journalist in the city” and her WIRED cover outsold every other issue in the last decade, save three. She’s made over 400 TV appearances, including CNN, MSNBC, Vh1, E!, Fox, CBS, and NBC. The former Editor-at-Large for Star magazine and dating columnist for Time Out New York has written for Cosmopolitan, Maxim, New York magazine, The Huffington Post and others.
She graduated from Georgetown with a degree in political science, and was the youngest legislative correspondent on Capitol Hill during the 107th Congress. Her father is still waiting for her to get a “real job” with health insurance.
The reality? Her start-up, NonSociety, is just a personal blog for her to dish on faux-boyfriends, failed relationships, and massive swings from cupcakes to Blue Print cleanses. Granted, she has written for a series of impressive publications—but all on the vapid topics of dating, sex, and becoming famous for no reason. Who knew all entrepreneurial success required was a personal blog, a lot of free time, and a bucket of slimy self-promotion?
Take from that what you will.
Tags: Campus, perpetual navel-gazers, unprecedented times, wharton, wharton women in business conference
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By Colin on October 9, 2009 at 11:00 am
Thank god someone else noticed that this hack weasled her way on to a prestigious conference roll. I wish I was there to boycott, but alas, I have a JOB. Which Ms. Alison Baugher, does not.
She’s a parasite on the interwebs, I hope she bombs badly.
i’m WG’11 and i can’t believe julia allison would even be allowed to register for the WWIB conference, much less serve as a panelist! how could this happen at wharton??? the presumably otherwise intelligent women responsible for panel invitations were either asleep at the switch or received a briefcase full of cash under the table…
Yep – color me embarrassed as well. I’m sure all these women who were qualified enough to go to business school want to hear her talk about how there aren’t any entrepreneurs of their sex and adolescent F U money dreams.
This is what happens when you select panelists based on their media kit. It wouldn’t have been difficult to verify any of Ms. Allison’s (incredibly wild and outdated) claims. A simple Google search would have sufficed.
For the record, the NonSociety website (which she “founded” — whoo boy) was meant to be a complement to a reality TV show on Bravo. The TV pilot was a disappointment, and the show was not picked up. The vanity blog, however, continues to limp along (traffic is down 55% since this time last year).
This certainly diminishes my opinion of and respect for Wharton.
If nobody can do a simple Google search (as mentioned above) to verify the outlandish claims in her press kit, how can we trust Wharton on anything else?
To those of us watching this debacle, it is apparent that Wharton has no standards for what it will present in its name, nor is there any quality control. Sad.