ABOUT
me
I’m Ashley Couto, women’s career and leadership coach, speaker, senior tech leader, award-winning 3x COO, writer & media contributor, and founder helping ambitious women get onto & move up the leadership ladder and make a meaningful impact in decision-making rooms.
HOW it STARTED
My grandparents fled a dictatorship to give me a shot at a better life. Playing it safe & staying small has never been in the cards for me.
I come from a lineage of strong, intuitive women known for getting shit done. Whether it’s mobilizing the women in the local village to stop food trucks from passing through the starving village without leaving food first or packing up and fleeing a dictatorship to the other side of the world with no connections and speaking not one word of English, I come from tough stuff.
Like so many of the women in my ancestry, leadership found me early. At 15, I was already leading the youth altar service at my church. It was my first experience with hiring (and firing), shift planning, dealing with HR problems, etc.
I’ve spent over 20 years leading teams in tech, professional services, and not-for-profits.
My experience is vast and ranges from small startups to large organizations with over 30,000 members, where I’ve led functions in people, communications, operations, marketing, sales, and customer experience.
Data shows that when women are in charge, everyone is better off.
But too few of us are in leadership roles or in the rooms where the most important decisions about our future are made. That’s why I’m on a mission to help more ambitious women get on the leadership ladder, move up the ranks to lead companies and boards, and start more companies.
I’ve been a coach since 2013 and I have personally coached over 2,000 clients (and counting) over the last 12 years. My entrepreneurial clients have made more than $120M and my professional clients have earned more than $6M in raises.
Even though I have been attacked by the manosphere for talking about how early sexual harassment affects women’s long-term earning potential in my TEDx talk and again for informing women in ELLE that their husbands can’t see who they voted for in a US election, I remain undeterred. The future is women-led, and I’m on a mission to help one million women end up in the rooms that matter.