"We are very proud of our chemical heritage, but we're moving forward because of where the most exciting innovation is occurring today," Kullman said in an interview with Fortune editor Alan Murray at the Council on Foreign Relations' Manhattan headquarters on Thursday morning.

She said DuPont DD spends about $2.2 billion in research and development every year, with 10% of it going toward long-term research. That kind of investment has meant that $10 billion of DuPont's $36 billion in revenue comes from products that didn't exist five years ago. Kullman’s working to up that figure over the next few years.

"In our world, price goes down, not up, without innovation," she explained. "Lots of competitors are out there looking to knock it off."

DuPont breaks innovation into three buckets: small, medium-sized, and new large product categories. She pointed to incremental developments as key, such as the next application of Kevlar (an extremely strong fiber often found in bulletproof vests) or Surlyn (a protective covering) in Nike NKE golf balls.

But the developments that really move the needle are new product categories, such as Rynaxypyr, an insecticide that paralyzes bugs and has low toxicity. She said that it's reached about a billion in revenue in five years, but it took 15 years to get it to where it is today due to the regulatory environment and required testing. She also pointed to big advancements in the applications of biotech in agriculture, such as drought-resistant corn plants.

Kullman said that these kind of developments, including genetically modified organisms (GMOs), are needed if we're going to feed our growing world population. While many consumers have a negative reaction to GMOs, she said that they've been studied thoroughly and have no known health effects.

"I was told by a member of Congress that we just had a branding problem--just don't call it GMOs and it would be okay," she said. "But I think part of the issue is we need to better educate the population in a very transparent, scientifically based framework."

Kullman also touched on activist investor Nelson Peltz, who has been pushing DuPont to split its agricultural business off from the rest of the company. "We are very active with our investors," she said. "We talk to them, we work with them, we understand their point of view."

She noted that the company she entered some 25 years ago looks very different today, thanks to an executive team that has actively managed the company’s portfolio of businesses. In the last year, DuPont has shed product lines (like glass laminating solutions) that Kullman described as having "peaked out on where innovation and science could drive growth."

Kullman started her current job in the beginning of 2009, as the U.S. economy suffered a major downturn. The timing helped give her clarity on what the company should look like, she said. "We saw very clearly how each product line reacted to a difficult economic situation," she said. The company narrowed in on agriculture and nutrition, advanced material, and industrial biosciences. That thinking in part drove her multi-billion-dollar acquisition of Danish food ingredient producer Danisco in 2011. "That's ours to prove," Kullman said of the company's narrowed focus, "but we have actively managed the portfolio. We see connectedness and growth capability of what is there now."

Much of the work Kullman is doing today is setting DuPont up for its future. "Our company is greatly enabled by decisions that were made 10, 20 years ago by our predecessors," whether opening up China or investment in certain research areas, she said. "Because of those decision, not all perfect by any stretch of imagination, we have a hand and set of opportunities that are ours to play out."

Walmart U.S., Wal-Mart Stores’s WMT $279-billion-a-year domestic division, announced that Chief Operating Officer Gisel Ruiz would be leaving to go to Walmart International, and be replaced immediately by Judith McKenna, a 20-year Wal-Mart veteran who most recently served as chief development officer for Walmart U.S.

It is the second time in two weeks that Walmart U.S. announces a major executive departure at the peak of the crucial holiday season: two days before the Thanksgiving/Black Friday weekend, when Christmas shopping goes into high gear, Chief Merchandising Officer Duncan McNaughton, responsible for product selection in the stores, left the retailer. He won’t be replaced: instead executives in charge of food, general merchandise, apparel and other business lines will report directly to Walmart CEO Greg Foran, himself a newbie, having taken the reins in August from Bill Simon.

The changes come as Walmart U.S. is trying to rev up sales after seven of the last eight quarters were without comparable sales growth. The retailer, which has been ever more aggressive in cutting prices this holiday season and offering bigger deals earlier, only expects comparable sales growth of 1% this holiday quarter. After last quarter’s meek 0.5% jump in comparable sales, Foran himself said there was much work to do, as Walmart U.S. grapples with stocking products that will attract more shoppers into its stores to reverse chronic declining store traffic trends.

Wal-Mart spokesperson Brooke Buchanan said that the COO change, which she characterized as part of the regular succession planning at the world’s largest retailer, wouldn’t hurt Walmart U.S. during this peak season or distract employees.

“Our plans for holiday have in place for months. We are in full execution mode in stores across the country. We feel really good making these announcements now because we feel strong about our execution plan,” Buchanan said.

Ruiz, ranked No. 28 on Fortune‘s list of the Most Powerful Women, has been appointed executive vice president of Walmart's International People Division and will report directly to Walmart International CEO David Cheesewright. McKenna will assume her responsibilities immediately and report directly to Foran.

McKenna joined Walmart nearly 20 years ago on its U.K. Asda management team, where she served as CFO and COO. She was then Walmart International as executive vice president of strategy and international development, before to Walmart U.S.

To me, it's insulting that the only explanation seems to be women's fault - and so spectacularly ill-informed.

If you really imagine women lack drive, consider this: at the London 2012 Olympics, the single most successful group of competitors were American women. For the first time in history, American women outperformed the rest of the world and they outperformed American men: winning 58 meets to the men's 45 and bringing home 29 of the 46 golds.

So no, I don't think drive is the explanation.

Then, why don't women more often apply for stretch jobs, the ones they could do if given the chance? Why are women more likely to confine themselves to applying only for those jobs they can demonstrably already do? If it isn't innate drive - what is it? The question acquires some urgency as companies seeking to reflect the markets they serve signally fail to do so at the most senior levels.

Having been a CEO of five companies, I’ve come to the conclusion that there are two answers to this question: covering and calculating.

Covering is a term used to describe the ways in which outside groups - women, minorities - try to cover up, minimize or disguise their difference. For women, this may manifest in any number of ways: never talking about domestic life, feigning an insincere interest in golf or football, steering clear of discussions on diversity. A recent Harvard study showed that 61 percent of workers covered up their true selves in some of these ways, of which 66 percent said that it significantly reduced their sense of self.

If you don't feel you can be yourself at work, you disable your talents. You may underplay your own competitiveness, assimilating to stereotypes of women as unambitious, gentle, nurturing. You may silence the inner critic that sees problems that need to be addressed. This deflects attack but subverts the energy, creativity and excellence that women bring to their work. Much of this is unconscious.

When I ran software businesses, my Chairman and lead investor was oblivious to my pregnancy; when I returned to work 2 weeks after my daughter was born, he asked me if I'd enjoyed my vacation. In retrospect, I can see now that I must have done a lot of covering for him not to see that I had been pregnant and now was not.

Calculating: Research shows that women are just as willing to compete in a game if - and it's a big if - they believe they have a good chance of winning. In the Olympics, women entered confident that they competed on a level playing field - on which they could, and did, win. At work, women are very good at gauging their chances, eschewing contests in which they’re likely to fail. In this, they often prove more astute than men who are more reckless.

Uri Gneezy, a highly original behavioral economist who pioneered this work, put it like this: "while many well-performing females hurt themselves financially by shying away from competition, poorly performing males also hurt themselves by embracing it."

So the challenge for women isn't that they lack competitiveness or drive. It's that they are shrewd estimators of risk and therefore spend too much energy trying to fit in, instead of standing out. And one way not to stand out is not to look ambitious or to ask for stretch assignments that we might not get.

On the other hand, if women lose those appeasing behaviors and do get more women to the top, both issues fall away: the norm changes so fitting in becomes less of an issue and women will get yet more chances of great jobs.

Is that risky? Yes, but the bigger risk lies in playing safe. That's where women are today.

If the first wave of feminism in the workplace focused on getting more women in, then the second wave must now focus on making women feel fully included: not as male clones and not as invisible women but as tough-minded, courageous but yes, still female women who know how good they are.

Inclusion must be the goal now: creating workplaces where discussions of anything - family, kids, opera, novels - is comfortable and acceptable, where using flexible working policies doesn't label you uncommitted and where applying for a job you don't get at first is seen as a respectable, normal way to articulate ambition.

The truth about competition and gender is this: some men and some women are more competitive than others. Being hyper-competitive is highly correlated with failure in life and in work. Achievement in your career is highly contingent on the networks of relationships and knowledge that you build, and these increase exponentially to the degree that you help and support each other generously. That means that competing with each other is counter-productive but supporting, encouraging and mentoring each other - so that you don't have to cover up who you are or what you want - can only make women and men stronger.

Margaret Heffernan has been CEO of 5 companies, including InfoMation Corporation, ZineZone Corporation and iCAST Corporation. She is also the author of Wilful Blindness (Bloomsbury 2011) and A Bigger Prize (2014). Her TED talk has been seen by over two million people.

In October, at Fortune’s Most Powerful Women summit, Buffett predicted that Hillary Clinton would be the next president of the United States. “Hillary Clinton is going to run, and she’s going to win,” Buffett said on stage.

Apparently, the prediction was more than just talk. According to Bloomberg, Buffett donated $25,000 in the third quarter to Ready for Hillary, a political organization that says it is laying the groundwork for a Clinton presidential run in 2016. That is the maximum the organization allows from a single donor. Overall, the group has raised $11 million.

Bloomberg says the donation was somewhat surprising because Buffett has criticized political action committees, like Ready for Hillary, in the past, and that he is known as a “political tightwad.” But Buffett has long been a supporter of Hillary Clinton. The Berkshire Hathaway CEO also backed Clinton's 2008 election campaign and held fundraisers in her honor.

At Fortune’s Most Powerful Women’s conference, he added that he was willing to bet on a Hillary presidency. And now he has.

If you’re looking for coverage of October’s Fortune’s 2014 Most Powerful Women Summit, it’s available here. The livestream of the Next Generation conference will be available on this page starting in the evening on December 2nd.

All times local (Pacific) time

TUESDAY, DECEMBER 2, 2014

WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 3, 2014

"Our company made the decision that English [would] become our official language," Qiao said at Fortune's Most Powerful Women International Summit in Hong Kong last month. "I thought maybe it's time for me to quit."

Qiao didn't leave Lenovo, which now has more than 60,000 employees. Instead, she dove into negotiations with IBM and quickly learned a plethora of English words, including business jargon--like "defined-benefit plan."

The tech exec, who is also the co-author of the book The Lenovo Way: Managing a Diverse Global Company for Optimal Performance, joined the $39-billion-revenue company 24 years ago as the secretary to the founder. She moved her way up, working on marketing and then leading the firm's global strategy and planning. "Many people ask me, 'Do you feel boring just working at the one company?'" she said. "I say, 'No, I never feel boring... I still feel nervous,'" adding that she likes to challenge herself.

On stage, Qiao also spoke of lessons the world's largest PC-maker has learned since that IBM deal in 2005. The company realized its leadership team didn't have global experience--nor, like Qiao, did many of them know English. "I didn't know how to work with people with a different background and at that time our business performance was not so great," she remembered.

Lenovo recently acquired IBM's low-end server unit and Google's Motorola Moblity unit--and it's put a priority on cultural integration. This time around, Lenovo has developed a standard to assess leaders across cultures. It's also prioritizing integration, starting with Motorola's supply chain and leaving sales and marketing merging for later.

At the end of her interview, Qiao offered the audience a bit of advice: "The best way to learn is to learn from your mistakes. The best way to learn is to expand your comfort zone."

By Leanne Italie, AP

Watch out world, the Girl Scouts are going digital to sell you cookies.

For the first time in nearly 100 years, Girl Scouts of the USA will allow its young go-getters to push their wares using a mobile app or personalized websites.

But only if their scout councils and guardians say OK.

"Girls have been telling us that they want to go into this space," said Sarah Angel-Johnson, chief digital cookie executive for the organization covering about 2 million girls. "Online is where entrepreneurship is going."

And the best news for these digital natives: They can have cookies shipped directly to your doorstep.

More than 1 million scouts, from kindergarten-age Daisies to teens, were expected to opt in as cookie-selling season cranks up this month and the scouting organization gets digital sales underway. But digital sales are intended to enhance, not replace, the paper spreadsheets used to generate an estimated $800 million in cookie sales a year -- at anywhere from $3.50 to $5 a box, depending on scout council.

There are important e-lessons here, scout officials said, such as better articulating and tracking goals, learning to handle customers and money in a new way, and more efficiently processing credit card information.

"A lot of people have asked, 'What took you so long to get online?' We spend a lot of time thinking how do we make this safe, scalable and smart," Kelly M. Parisi, chief communications executive for Girl Scouts of the USA, said at a recent demonstration for select media.

Councils were offered one of the two platforms but not both. For web-based sales, scouts customize their pages, using their first names only, and email prospective customers with links to click on for orders. They can also put up videos explaining who they are and what they plan to do with their proceeds.

The mobile platform offers tabs for tracking sales and allows for the sale of bundles of different kinds of cookies. It can be used on a phone or tablet.

"They can get them quicker than waiting for me to deliver them because sometimes it takes me a long time to deliver," offered 11-year-old Priscilla at the preview. The adults at the event asked that only first names of scouts be used.

The websites will not be accessible without an email invitation, requiring the girls to build client lists. And personal information is as protected as any digits out there, for both the scouts and customers, using encryption in some cases.

Much of the responsibility to limit identifying details about scouts online falls on parents.

Troop Leader Karen Porcher of the Bronx has an 11-year-old scout and is particularly psyched about the digital options. They live in a house rather than an apartment, and she and her husband work at home, eliminating at-office cookie and neighborly building sales.

"During cookie season my daughter is wearing her (scout) vest on the subway and people are so excited to see a Girl Scout," Porcher explained. "Strangers actually will buy a case of cookies and wait for her to call. This is going to be amazing because now she can just say 'Give me your business card,' or 'I'll take your email address,' send the email and they can be delivered. This is gonna be sweet."

Porcher also sees word-of-mouth value in getting cookies delivered quickly.

"People are going to be walking around with cookies and others are going to say, 'Whoa, how did you get those already?’"

Zack Bennett of Manhattan has a 9-year-old scout who sold more than 1,000 boxes last year. She hopes to increase her goal to 1,500 this season and went through training to learn how to set up her new cookie website.

But dad won't be letting her loose alone.

"I'll be sitting in the backseat to help her, certainly when it comes to credit cards, things of that sort," he said. "But it makes perfect sense to have it be on the computer. It's definitely time the Girl Scouts came into the 21st century."

I am fortunate to work at a company run by a woman, and not just any woman. She's been a force at our ad agency for over thirty years, and as many of your readers probably know, Karen Kaplan rose from receptionist to Chairman and CEO. As you'd expect, she is bright, savvy, seasoned, and deeply knowledgeable about our business, and I learn from her every day.

But I think what working women (and men) sometimes forget is that you can (and should) learn from everyone, at every level, at your company. Good lessons and bad. Strategies for being more productive, more efficient and yes, sometimes, more political. Not to mention, how to manage and perhaps even more important, how NOT to manage. Women have a different journey than men when rising to the C-suite and it's particularly different (and arguably more complicated) if they are raising children.

I've been working for over 20 years, and my career shifted when I had children and moved across the country. Like all working mothers, at any given moment I juggle playdates, soccer practice, summer camp, tantrums, and yes, head lice, along with work responsibilities. I don't have much time to plot out my career path these days. I'm not in the C-suite yet, but there are a few things I've learned about how to keep my career climbing, sort of, despite - indeed sometimes because of - complications:

There is no substitute for confidence
As argued by Katty Kay, BBC News anchor and co-author of The Confidence Code, the confidence gap between men and women is real. Confidence does not mean bragging, being a blowhard or deliberately misrepresenting your abilities (although we've all seen that work too). It means being intimately familiar with your talents, experience and accomplishments, and seizing every appropriate opportunity to showcase them. If you are negotiating for a promotion, be comfortable talking about how you've earned it. Anticipate pushback - and go into the meeting prepared, with a calm, confident, and professional approach removed from emotion.

Be authentic
And by that I mean be honest. Be true to yourself. Don't model yourself or your career based on anyone else. Recognize your value, but also your limitations and where you can improve. You can speak truth to power, but do it respectfully and professionally, with humility and grace and only when appropriate.

Go (and stay) where you are celebrated
I'm borrowing this one from our CEO because I believe it deeply. I once spent four miserable years at a company where I intuitively knew the fit wasn't right. They were the longest four years of my career, and I'm sure it was no picnic for them either. When the culture of a place aligns with your own values and ideas, you are much more likely to thrive. And when you're happy at work, you're a better worker - not to mention a better mother, wife, colleague and friend.

Manage yourself
Give yourself quarterly performance reviews, even if no one else is. Be a problem solver, not a problem presenter. Be realistic. Be forgiving. Realize you cannot have and be everything at once. Focus and learn patience, which is different advice than being patient. If this seems difficult, try doing it while raising three children alone and going back to school. See? Now it's not so hard.

Never give anything less than your best
Anything else is a waste of your precious time. You are building your own brand, whether you realize it or not. In the movie Chef, Jon Favreau plays a talented chef struggling to build a new food truck business. His young son, helping him in the truck, one day attempts to save a few minutes by serving a free but slightly charred Cubano sandwich to a customer. Chef grabs it from his hand. “What does it matter? He’s not paying for it,” his son argues. Chef looks hard into his son’s eyes and says, "I love this. I'm good at this and I want to share this with you. I get to touch people's lives with what I do. And it keeps me going and I love it. Now, should we have served that sandwich?" The kid makes a new sandwich.

Read all answers to the MPW Insider question: How can women rise to the C-suite?

How failure could get you to the C-suite by Ang?lica Fuentes, CEO of Omnilife.

Why hard work won’t get you to the C-suite by Stephanie Ruhle, Editor-at-Large, Bloomberg News and Anchor/Managing Editor, BloombergTV.

How can women rise to the C-suite? by Denise Morrison, President and CEO of Campbell Soup Company.

STORY, an innovative boutique that combines merchandising with sponsorship and live events and "experiences," has been a topic of conversation in media and retail circles since it opened in 2011. Top executives from the likes of PepsiCo PEP , GE GE , Estee Lauder EL , Home Depot HD and L Brands LB , as well as Martha Stewart herself, have all made pilgrimages to see it in person.

But this was Target, a company Shechtman revered and had always wanted to partner with. So she started chatting up one of the visiting executives, who introduced himself as "Brian." She shared a few ideas with him about how she could collaborate with Target, and at the end of their conversation, he gave her his card.

"Brian," it turned out, was Brian Cornell, the retail giant's chairman and CEO.

From there she convinced him to become the store's exclusive paid sponsor for the "Home for the Holidays STORY," a partnership they would have to pull together in a matter of weeks--record time.

Earlier this month, Shechtman opened Target's Home for the Holidays STORY, the space reinvented as a cozy mountain retreat, with a working fireplace, wood beams, antler chandeliers and soft white shag rugs and chunky glittery candles everywhere. Products from 20 of Target’s exclusive brands (Merona, Threshold, Sonia Kashuk, etc.) are showcased alongside the store's traditional mix of products.

Shechtman first told me about meeting Target's CEO at the Fortune Most Powerful Women Summit, which she attended this year as one of our Fortune Most Promising Women Entrepreneurs (for the full list, see here). But we first met at a networking party when I was out hunting for 40 under 40 candidates for Fortune in 2008. Over the years, she has supplied me with a trove of names (I learned Rachel is a consummate connector of people). And full disclosure: we've become friends.

So I've had a sort of front-row view to STORY's story (based on its success, Shechtman herself made the 40 under 40 list in 2013). I saw the raw space when she first procured it, and I have been a visitor since the very first STORY, which launched in "beta" in 2011 (the first physical store to do so).

In Shechtman's description of it, STORY sells things like a store, has a point of view like a magazine, and gets stripped down and reinvented every four to eight weeks like a gallery--with a little bit of community center thrown in. This is a pretty apt encapsulation.

Yes, STORY makes money from selling fashion, home and accessory items, but it also has lucrative partnerships with big companies like PepsiCo, Hewlett-Packard HP , GE, Home Depot, American Express AXP and more. Companies typically pay from $75,000 to $500,000 to sponsor each roughly-monthly theme, or "STORY," often with collaborations that include events or experiences.

For Procter & Gamble's sponsorship of the male-themed "His STORY," for example, there was a hot-towel shaving station. When GE sponsored a "Making Things" STORY, 3-D printers and laser cutters lined the floor for customers to try. For Target's partnership, events will include an evening discussion with Nate Berkus and make-up lessons from Sonia Kashuk and weekend events, such as a free lunch from a locally-sourced food truck that supports Drive Change, a nonprofit focused on incarcerated youth. (All recipes will involve maple syrup from Archer Farms, available...only at Target.)

A former brand consultant for TOMS, Kraft and others, she says these experiences are critical to engaging the customer. Instead of sales per square foot, she talks about "experience per square foot."

"We love that STORY takes an entirely different approach to retail, and we were really intrigued by the idea of Rachel weaving her favorite Target products into STORY's holiday concept," says Cornell, who has called STORY "beautifully curated."

That too is an apt description. I actually prefer to visit STORY when Rachel is not there because then I can fully immerse myself in the experience. There's so much to see and take in that I just zone out and wander in my own world. When I am chatting with Shechtman in the store, I find that I miss too much of what's around me.

So I may not actually see Shechtman when I stop in to do my holiday shopping in the next few weeks. She'll be busy enough: the average Saturday now has more than 2,000 people in her store.

One place I know I'll see her for sure: at the upcoming Fortune Most Powerful Women Next Gen Summit in San Francisco. Rachel will be joining us in a panel on entrepreneurship, where she'll talk about defying traditional retail models and inventing a new one. That's exactly what she's done--and big companies are taking note.

"From the MPW Co-chairs" is a series where the editors who oversee the Fortune Most Powerful Women brand share their insights about women leaders.

On Tuesday, December 2, Fortune will host its first-ever Most Powerful Women Next Gen Summit. More than 200 rising star executives from Fortune 500 companies, startups, nonprofits and more will gather at the Ritz-Carlton in San Francisco for two days to network, share stories, and hear from big-name executives, founders and leaders. The vast majority of delegates were nominated to attend by their bosses, some of the biggest CEOs and executives in the Fortune 500 and at fast-growing companies across the tech sector.

Ten of the nominees talked to Fortune about finding success, career advice they gleaned as they rose through the ranks, and more. Many of their nominators answered our questions too--executives like Facebook’s FB Sheryl Sandberg and IBM IBM SVP Bridget van Kralingen--and also explained how these young women caught their eye.

Nominees are on the left, nominators on the right. Additional reporting by Shalene Gupta.

So what's a female founder to do?

If you're Emily Weiss, you shrug off rejection. The 29-year-old founder of beauty blog Into The Gloss recently raised $8.4 million in funding; she plans to use the capital to scale her new skincare line Glossier. "I'm not afraid of being told 'no'," she says of her journey to millions. "It was an important exercise in understanding different funds and learning which would be the best fit for me."

Rather than just licking her wounds when an investor turned her down, Weiss pushed for feedback so she could continue iterating her business plan. "So much of venture capital is pattern recognition," she says. "I sat across the table from many men who might not have necessarily understood the difference between foundation and tinted moisturizer." Weiss handled male VCs beauty illiteracy by tweaking her pitch to emphasize her success--her blog's 8.5 million monthly pageviews--and discuss the market needs her company addresses in the $454 billion beauty market. "The onus is on you to make your idea compelling," says Weiss.

Before her most recent fundraising round, Weiss found a trusted investor in Forerunner Ventures' Kirsten Green. Green's firm, which is known for helping to launch wildly successful e-commerce companies like Warby Parker and Birchbox, provided seed funding for Into the Gloss. "Kirsten dove deep, asking the most questions because she is also a consumer of these products," Weiss says. "I could feel her conviction and I knew that when we said yes to working together it meant as much to her as it meant to me." Green was also Weiss' connection to Thrive Capital, which led Into the Gloss' most recent fundraising round.

Hadley Mullin, a partner at private equity firm TSG Consumer Partners, says the gender imbalance in the investment community does not make sense--especially at firms that invest in consumer brands, as women drive household spending. "For male and female entrepreneurs alike, having a woman investor can bring credibility when discussing product positioning and expansion opportunities," she says. Mullin adds that while some male investors have a track record of working well with women entrepreneurs, female investors tend connect more easily with products created by or for women.

But, for the time, the investment world's poor gender dynamics remain unchanged. Weiss says that women entrepreneurs need to take matters into their own hands and work hard to articulate what makes their businesses valuable and distinct. It's an uphill battle, but she says it is well worth the fight: Finding strong funding partners, she explains, can allow female entrepreneurs to create brands that matter.

"I approached fundraising as an opportunity to align myself with partners who have more varied experience and diverse backgrounds than I do, to help bring Glossier to life," she says. "I'm so fortunate to have aligned myself with Kirsten; it was like finding a needle in a haystack."

Plenty of corporate America's most influential women have been raving for eons about the benefits of marrying someone unafraid of domestic responsibilities. In 2002, of the 187 participants at Fortune‘s Most Powerful Women Summit, about 30% had househusbands. More recently, Xerox XRX CEO Ursula Burns credited much of her success to marrying a man 20 years her elder. He retired to take care of their two kids just when her career was hitting its stride; Ulta CEO Mary Dillon's husband, a biochemist by training, did the same. And, of course, Facebook FB COO Sheryl Sandberg has famously said that picking a spouse (preferably one who splits housework) is a woman's most important career choice.

But it all may be much ado about nothing. More dads than ever before are staying home full-time with their children--yet just 12% of female business leaders have full-time support at home from their partners. This compares to 55% of married male executives with stay-at-home spouses, according to surveys of alumnae conducted by researchers at Harvard Business School and the CUNY Graduate Center. Other studies purport that 60% of the men have partners who don't work full-time outside the home, compared with only 10% of the women.

And despite popular culture's anecdotal belief that younger generations perceive gender roles differently than their parents, a recent study suggests otherwise. Harvard Business Review surveyed 25,000 Harvard Business School graduates and 66% of millennial men expect their partners to take the primary responsibility for raising children--and only 42% of recent women HBS grads expect to fill that role.

That disconnect isn't unprecedented. While only 25% of Gen X women HBS graduates expected their partner’s career to take priority over theirs, 40% ended up in that very situation--and found themselves understandably disappointed.

The competitive implications of this discrepancy are obvious. While some companies have made great strides to become gender neutral when it comes to promoting employees, unconscious biases against women with family responsibilities exist. And the numbers speak for themselves: Only 5% of Fortune 1000 companies are led by women.

Certainly, it's not impossible for moms to rise the ranks without a stay-at-home spouse. Of those 51 Fortune 1000 women CEOs, 84% have children--and many execs in Fortune's Most Powerful Women community have equally driven husbands by their sides. YouTube CEO GOOG Susan Wojcicki, who is pregnant with her fifth child, is married to a fellow Googler. Phebe Novakovic, the CEO of General Dynamics GD , is married to Boeing's BA former chief lobbyist. In a display of perhaps the ultimate power couple, John Lundgren is the CEO of Stanley Black & Decker SWK and is wife Tamara is the CEO of Schnitzer Steel Industries SCHN -- both Fortune 500 firms. And Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer is hitched to Zachary Bogue, a lawyer-turned-investor-turned-founder who has significant (and self-earned) clout in Silicon Valley.

Yet the majority of those power duos have the financial ability to hire help. The masses are not so lucky--and that, mixed with millennials' clearly misaligned relationship expectations, requires a larger conversation around the topic.

Without that discussion, many Gen-Y women hoping to rise the ranks may be on the same disappointing climb as the bulk of their predecessors.

Clarification: This story has been updated to clarify that Phebe Novakovic’s husband is recently retired.

To subscribe to Caroline Fairchild's daily newsletter on the world's most powerful women, go to www.getbroadsheet.com.

According to a recent study by the Harvard Business Review, 66% of millennial men expect their partner to take the primary responsibility for raising children. On the other hand, only 42% of millennial women think they will be the main caregiver.

That’s quite a gap, and if the numbers above are to be believed, this is a fight that women are ultimately losing.

The HBR study found that 28% of Generation X women and 44% of Baby Boomer women had taken at least six months off work at some point in their careers to take care of their kids. How many men in those two generations had to take a similar break? A minuscule 2%.

In Generation X and the Baby Boomer generation, even women who didn’t expect to end up in a “traditional” arrangement -- where the man’s career is prioritized and women take most of the child-raising roles -- often ended up in one. Generation X includes people aged between 32 and 48, while Boomers are between 49 and 67.

Only 25% of women in Generation X expected to be in a “traditional” arrangement when it comes to one person’s career taking precedence, but 40% ended up in that situation. Fifty percent of women thought their childcare arrangements would be “traditional,” but it ended up that way for 65% of them. Women CEOs in the Fortune 1000 are also more likely than their male counterparts to be married and have kids. It’s worth noting, though, that there is an increasing number of Fortune 500 CEOs with husbands who do not work.

HBR notes that an millennial men who graduate from Harvard Business School are less likely than their older counterparts to enter a relationship with the expectation that their career will take precedence over that of their partner. Obviously, that’s a good start, but there’s still that pesky fact that many of these same men are expecting that women will be the main caregiver for children. And, as previous generations have shown, saying you think you and your partner’s careers will take equal precedence does not mean that’s how things will turn out.

Editor’s note: The HBR survey looked at around 25,000 graduates of Harvard Business School. Reliable data about sexual orientation wasn’t available, so the HBR study assumed that the people surveyed were in opposite-sex relationships.

The ULI is the leading think tank and research organization for the real estate and development industry, and interviewing me at the annual luncheon in Philadelphia was Marilyn Jordan Taylor, the dean of the University of Pennsylvania School of Design.

Taylor is a Most Powerful Woman in real estate in her own right. She has been dean of Penn's graduate school for architecture, city planning, landscape architecture and other disciplines since 2008 (her term was extended earlier this year)--and prior to that, she was a partner in the the urban design and planning practice at architecture firm Skidmore Owings & Merrill. She was also the first woman to head the ULI when she held the organization's top role from 2005 to 2007.

Taylor is a highly engaging interviewer, and our lively conversation covered everything from urbanism trends to my career path to the future of journalism. But she held a keen interest in, and focused much of the conversation on, my role in Fortune's Most Powerful Women enterprise. The room was predominantly women in real estate, many of them young, and Taylor wanted to know specifically what trends I observed coming off this year's Most Powerful Women Summit. I talked about the momentum behind women being named to run Fortune 500 companies--26 today up from just two in 2000, and being named to much more prominent roles throughout all of business; I also cited the very recent trend of women being named to the COO role at a number of high-profile tech companies. (This is great progress, I said, despite still having a long way to go.)

Talk soon turned to how real estate, at the leadership and executive level, is one of the last male-dominated bastions of business. In many ways, this is not a surprise; on the property and ownership side, many of the largest real estate firms are run by family dynasties where the baton typically has passed to the sons. The homebuilding industry, on the other hand, is a close cousin of the male-dominated construction business. The investment side, too, has historically been run by men.

Our conversation got me thinking, and when I got back to the office I started putting together a list of women in real estate I either already knew of or had come across in my reporting for The End of the Suburbs. Then I started looking a little more. Is real estate changing as rapidly as the rest of the ranks of business? Maybe not yet, but I came up with the beginnings of a pretty interesting list, one I thought worth sharing here. Huge, boldfaced caveat: This is only what I came up with from the existing research I'd done for my book and a very quick additional search. I'm missing lots of people here. But in the name of starting somewhere, here we go. In no particular order:

On the owner/developer/management side, there's Ivanka Trump, executive vice president of the Trump Organization (and member of Fortune's just-released, 2014 40 under 40 list) and Maryanne Gilmartin, president and CEO of Forest City Ratner Companies.

In New York, I. Dolly Lenz reigns when it comes to the high-profile megadeal.

On the commercial side, there's Mary Ann Tighe, CEO of CBRE, Tristate Area, Laura Pomerantz, vice chairman of Cushman and Wakefield, and Faith Hope Consolo, chairman of the retail group of Douglas Elliman.

In homebuilding, there's Kira Sterling, CMO of Toll Brothers (and Deborah Wahl, formerly the CMO of Pulte Homes, became the CMO of McDonald's MCD earlier this year).

In planning, there's Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, who cofounded the influential firm Duany Plater-Zyberk, and Janette Sadik-Khan, former Transportation Commissioner of New York City now with the former Mayor's city-consultancy Bloomberg Associates.

The anti-sprawl organizing body the Congress for the New Urbanism named Lynn Richards, formerly of the EPA's office of sustainable communities, as its president earlier this year.

There's also architect Zaha Hadid; Marianne Cusato, the author and urban designer who created the Katrina Cottages; and Sarah Susanka, pioneer of the Not So Big House movement.

Rosemary Scanlon is dean of NYU's Schack Institute of Real Estate.

In the tech/Silcon Valley realm, there's Amy Bohutinsky, CMO of Zillow, and Sarah Leary, cofounder of the social-networking-for-neighborhoods site Nextdoor.

On the investment side, there's Robyn Sorid, cofounder of G4 Capital Partners.

Particular headway has been made by women in REITs (real estate investment trusts) lately: Debra Cafaro is chairman and CEO of $20 billion health care REIT Ventas; Wellington Denahan heads mortgage REIT Annaly Capital; Constance Moore is president and CEO of BRE Properties (which merged with Essex Property Trust last year to form the leading west coast multifamily property REIT).

Marguerite Nader is the president and CEO of Equity Lifestyle Properties, Sam Zell's publicly-traded resort and lifestyle property portfolio. (Incidentally, Zell himself is a friend to my book's main thesis, proclaiming on CNBC last year the "end of suburbia.")

If this seems like a long list, that's because "real estate" encompasses many different disciplines (and I'm leaving out policy and government for now--there are many more to add there).

As anyone in real estate knows, women are still underrepresented in the top ranks. But as they are in all industries, women are starting to take more prominent roles; I expect that trend to gain momentum in real estate, too.

Keep an eye on this field in the coming years. In the meantime, let's add to this list. Who am I missing? Tell me at leigh_gallagher@fortune.com.

"From the MPW Co-chairs" is a series where the editors who oversee the Fortune Most Powerful Women brand share their insights about women leaders.

Boudreaux, 54, ran the largest division of the largest U.S. insurer. With $113.8 billion in revenue out of United Health’s UNH $125.8 billion in total revenue under her control, Boudreaux was long believed to be a possible successor to UnitedHealth Group CEO Stephen Hemsley. But in a surprise announcement on Wednesday, the company said it had formed a new Office of the CEO. It’s composed of four people, two of whom--David Wichmann and Larry Renfro--were given expanded duties.

Boudreaux was not part of that team--and, it seems, concluded it was time to move on. She spoke to Fortune on Wednesday afternoon and, when asked, said that she did not want to comment on the leadership changes. “It’s been a great run,” she said. “I’m really proud of our results, and I’ve accomplished what I came here to do.”

What Boudreaux did--besides preside over an amazing growth period since she started in 2008, as United grew its already huge revenues by some 50%--was to help create a culture strong enough to support the fast-paced growth of the company. She created an environment that developed “trust with the people we serve,” something that does not come easily in the health care industry. It is leading and putting together teams, she said, that she has loved the best--not all that surprising given her background: she was a basketball and track star while an undergraduate at Dartmouth College.

So what’s next? After taking a little bit of time to watch her youngest son play basketball in his final year of high school (his older brother is also a basketball star at Dartmouth), Boudreaux says she intends to run something significant. “I love to lead businesses,” she said. “I”m going to be open-minded about it, but I do want to lead an enterprise where I can make a difference. I’m definitely not retiring.”

Analysts think she won’t have a problem landing elsewhere--although she does have a two year noncompete in her industry. “She has a lot of really good experience,” says Vishnu Likraj, senior analyst at Morningstar. “She performed very, very solidly. I’d assume she’d have an easy time [finding a new position.]” Hopefully, we’ll see her in a new role in time for the 2015 edition of Fortune‘s Most Powerful Women in Business list.

"From the MPW Co-chairs" is a series where the editors who oversee the Fortune Most Powerful Women brand share their insights about women leaders.

In a one-on-one interview with lifestyle icon Martha Stewart at Stewart’s American Made Summit on Saturday, Lively said impending motherhood has not slowed her down.

"I function best when I have too much on my plate. It's been a lot of blood, sweat and tears," she said. "I thought I wanted a 9 to 5 job and it is - 9 a.m. to 5 a.m. There is nothing on the site that I'm not involved with."

Lively launched Preserve in July, a lifestyle website that she describes as "part magazine, part e-commerce hub, part philanthropic endeavor." The website features stories about products and people, and it also sells clothes, food, home goods and even jewelry.

"Preserve is just an extension of my personal life," Lively said. "When I'm at home, I'm baking, I'm decorating - this is what I love to do. Preserve is more about sharing my personal life."

Though Stewart recently criticized Lively and actress Gwyneth Paltrow, who recently hired former Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia MSO CEO Lisa Gersh to run her website Goop, for their forays into the lifestyle sphere, she and Lively made nice on stage. Stewart introduced Lively as her "friend and neighbor," and Lively referred to Stewart as her "idol."

As Lively spoke about her new role as a businesswoman, she admitted she may not have a ton of expertise, but she has an incredible amount of passion. She said that she's had really great teachers and mentors (like Stewart) to guide her along the way.

"I rely heavily on friends, loved ones and people that I look up to," she said. "I've always been hungry for knowledge and experience."

And that hunger for experience is what inspired her to pursue something other than acting and launch Preserve. A few months prior, Stewart reportedly called Lively's new venture "stupid,” asking, "Why would you want to be me when you can be an actress?"

At Saturday's event, Lively explained that acting is a career she does not control. Though she loves the profession, she said the job’s unpredictability always scared her because she also knew how much she wanted to be a mother.

"Acting is something that's very much in the hands of other people," she said. "I want to create my own career. A big part of wanting to start Preserve was that I need a world that is my own where I'm in charge of my success or failure at the end of the day. I want to be able to own that."

Companies from Airbnb to Uber have been poaching political staffers, many of them female, as lobbying legislators and influencing regulators becomes more integral to their businesses.

To name a few: Jill Hazelbaker, the national communications director for John McCain's 2008 presidential campaign joined Snapchat in October to head the company's communications and policy efforts (Hazelbaker had previously been Google’s senior director of communications and government relations). Katie Biber, senior legal advisor to Mitt Romney's 2012 presidential campaign is now in the same role at Airbnb. Niki Christoff worked on the policy side of John McCain's 2008 presidential campaign before decamping for Google GOOG , where she now heads communications for the East Coast.

But campaigns also seem to attract and develop a certain type of character well suited to Silicon Valley. It's no surprise that hiring managers look for political experience: both sectors are fast-paced and high-stakes, attracting people who are highly motivated by risk and reward.

"People who work on campaigns tend to be scrappy, to work really hard and to be entrepreneurs," says Christoff. Women who cut their teeth in the rough-and-tumble world of politics emerge from campaigns uniquely suited to the demanding, stressful and high-risk environment at growing technology companies, she adds.

Despite the public's focus on Obama's digitally savvy team, former McCain staffers like Christoff seem plenty appealing to Silicon Valley. Christoff's colleague Samantha Smith is a manager for Google's global communications and public policy team, after working on the McCain campaign's communications team and serving as press secretary to Sen. Richard Burr (R - N.C.) as well as communications director to his 2010 reelection campaign.

Studies have shown that women are less inclined to take financial and career risks, but "with big risks come big rewards," Christoff says. "People who go into politics have a very high tolerance for risk because fifty percent of the time, you're not going to win."

Campaign staffers are conditioned for chaos, which helps develop skills that translate to the breakneck speed of the technology industry, Smith says. Fast-paced, high-growth and closely scrutinized, "political campaigns are the ultimate start-ups," she says. "Success requires responsiveness to user feedback, in this case the voters."

The migration from politics to tech, of course, is not limited to women. In September, Uber, the car-sharing service treading piecemeal regional regulations, snapped up David Plouffe, President Barack Obama's 2008 campaign manager, as its senior vice president of policy and strategy. Facebook FB has made several hires from Capitol Hill, including Joel Kaplan, White House Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy to President George W. Bush--who was promoted last month to the social network's vice president of global policy. And there's Tucker Bounds, a McCain campaign spokesperson who left Facebook in September to work on a startup called Sidewire.

Given the spate of hires and promotions this fall, Silicon Valley's interest in Washington shows no signs of flagging. "Tech and politics at their base level are similar," Christoff says. "They're not about money but winning hearts and minds."

Related: What does an election cost? A look at the numbers

An earlier version of this article did not include that Hazelbaker worked at Google before joining Snapchat.