Get up close and personal with our Most Admired Woman winners!

Cathe Dykstra
Category: Community/Nonprofits
Job Title: President, CEO, Family Scholar House

Are there any families who've come through the program that stand out in your mind?
I love all of our families exactly the same. But there are some who don’t come from a strong family of origin. They may have come directly out of foster care, or they may have some fractured or broken relationships in their family, and often because they decide to do better, they lose their family support. I’m particularly close to those because they’re missing something. We try to replace whatever families lose in trying to do better. So id what they lose is a connection to a mother or aunt figure, an older woman who can help them with things that are unrelated to education but are just part of being human, than that’s a blessing for me to be there. It is not an accident that ‘family’ is the first word in our name. We are a family for families, and they are family for us.

How do you separate work and home life?
If we’re going to talk about work-life balance, that is not me. I am definitely not the poster child for that. But I am at a unique point in my life because I don’t have a child at home. My daughter is 27, and I don’t need to get home and fix a meal. My husband is very independent, too, so I have the opportunity to give more than a defined period of work. I really love what I do. It doesn’t feel like a job – it feels like a mission, a passion, so I’m always open to whatever idea or thing that might pull me back into it.

What do you like to do when you’re not working?
I’m a baseball fanatic, and I love to go to baseball games. I also walk, I read, I’m active in my church and in my husband’s church, and I try to be very involved in faith-filled things. I do a little bit of volunteering and spend time with my daughter and my family.

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Jane C. Morreau
Category: Corporate
Job Title: Senior Vice President and Chief Production Officer, Brown-Forman

What are you looking forward to right now?
We go on fabulous vacations every summer. It used to be my husband planning all of them, but now my daughter just takes over. The whole family is going to St. Lucia — not my whole extended family, just my immediate family.

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Dr. Doris Tegart
Category: Education
Job Title: Provost, Bellarmine University

What are your strengths?
I think one of my strengths is also my weakness, and that’s impatience. But impatient people are also the ones who can get things rolling and say, ‘Let’s get this done.’ So it can be a strength. Another one is being able to look at things differently. And there are many big-idea people, but I think I have the ability to follow an idea through the fruition on the operational side as well.

What are you most proud of?
Professionally, it’s when I became involved with women’s studies and the women’s affairs department at IU as a grad student. My major was education/administration with a split minor in women and folklore. I really got into it, and I thought there should be an organization for women administrators. A person helped me start one, and they just invited me back for their 25^th year. So that’s kind of cool. I feel good about that. Now it’s just a common way of thinking, but when I started teaching in 1972, little girls couldn’t play on the gym equipment, and they couldn’t wear slacks. It was just so blatant, but today it’s more dangerous because it’s subtle. I’m very aware of this, and I certainly am very aware of mentoring other women and not being a queen bee. So when my daughter refused to make a snow-‘man’ in first grade and my son stood up at his graduation and said, ‘Look at this stage. Where’s the diversity?’ – those were my personal victories.

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Claudia DeLatorre
Category: Food/Entertainment
Job Title: Owner, Cake Flour Bakery

Do you cook at home?
Not so much anymore. I’m too busy, so I usually leave the cooking to my husband. When I was at home more often, I made everything from scratch, from the pasta to the sauce. I do still make my own sauce from scratch in one huge batch and just keep it in the freezer. And I’ve been making a lot of smoothies lately.

You put in a lot of hours at work. How do you juggle that and your family?
My in-laws are here, so they help me out a lot. And this year, my husband’s been away doing his residency – he’ll be done in July – so I feel for all those women who are single moms. I’m glad I only have to experience that for one year. In the summer, the kids will go down to my parents’ home in Florida and hang out with them for a while. I didn’t have my grandparents growing up, so the fact that they’re able to experience both sets of grandparents and have those relationships – it’s so important, and I’m so grateful for that.