She rose to the top with a reputation for straight shooting but now her life revolves around giving back and doing good. Has Theresa Gattung gone woo woo?
Asked why she believes successive governments have not done more to close the gender pay gap, Theresa Gattung says: “Because women are always asked to wait. That’s my answer.
“There’s always higher priorities, the environment or whatever – different governments have different priorities – but in the end it’s not women.”
She is a feminist and says she has been from the age of 15 or 16 when she first started reading feminist literature: “I wanted to do everything I could to make the world, New Zealand in particular, as good a place for girls when I passed as when I was born, and I don’t know if I can do that because a lot of the forces at the moment in the world are against that.”
One way she has been trying to do it is by closing the gender pay gap. She has advocated for, spoken and written about the gap for years. Every time she has, there’s been a backlash from people who claim it doesn’t exist or is being misrepresented or is otherwise not an issue.
“Some people are threatened by it,” she says. “Some white men are threatened.”
She describes Māori women as the country’s “most discriminated against group, potentially”.
She tells a story about a conference she organised in 2017: “One of the women who spoke was an activist called Leonie Pihama – lesbian, feminist academic. She moved me to tears, and she made me realise what was missing. Because she basically said: ‘We need you Pākehā women. We cannot do this by ourselves’.”
The nonprofit Gattung chairs, Global Women (“Vision: To see remarkable women running and raising our countries, companies, and communities”) recently submitted in opposition to the Treaty Principles Bill.
“I say to everyone who has a different view: ‘Do you understand that Māori is not a grievance economy now?’
“They have taken that Treaty settlement money and some of them didn’t even get that, like Ngāti Whātua – that wasn’t part of the Treaty settlement process; that was a different process – but they’ve taken that and they’ve built businesses and farms and putea that makes New Zealand better and stronger.
“We have to be in partnership. We cannot go backwards 20, 40, 100 years. It’s insane.”
If wāhine Māori can achieve their potential, she says, “I think the country is unstoppable”.
The people that have hurt her most in her career, she says, have been women.
“I don’t want to go into the details because these people are all still living, right, but there were women who tried to derail my career because they believed that there’s only room for one woman at the table – at two different companies actually – and that made me cry.
“I couldn’t understand it because I never – absolutely never – was a queen bee.
“You can talk to the hundreds and thousands of people who’ve worked for me or around me, and they will all tell you the same thing: People would come up to me and say: ‘Look, the support you gave me, what you said was life-changing.’
“I’ve always supported others to live their best potential, but particularly women. So I was deeply hurt when I, when I was attacked, manipulated or attacked, lied to or lied about by women in particular.
“With men, I dealt with that much better. I just saw it as competition for resources, and I never took it personally, but with women I did.
“If you choose to live in these two small islands, you have to take a very long term view. You have to be very careful about ever losing your rag with anybody, ever putting anyone down, ever bagging anybody, because they turn up as your next boss or your brother-in-law. And that is New Zealand.”
At the beginning of 2005, she was CEO of Telecom and part of a committed relationship of more than 20 years. By the end of 2007, she was neither.
It was one of the toughest periods of her life.
“I think one of the reasons my long-term relationship ended was because I wasn’t paying enough attention, because I was so focused on my job as CEO of Telecom. While we were very different people, and it might have ended anyway, if I could change one thing, I’d go back and I would redo the last five years of that 20-year relationship.”
She says the breakup was not acrimonious and she remains good friends with her former partner John, and with his current partner.
She didn’t resign from Telecom because of the relationship split, but says not having John in her life made the company’s tumultuous 2006-2007 much more difficult. She says she wasn’t depressed but there were times she was lonely. “It was really hard,” she says.
She was still only 45. She lived life: went travelling with friends, wrote a book, began working with a friend to help the struggling SPCA, joined the board of an organisation trying to reinvigorate New Zealand’s wool industry and joined the board of multinational insurance company AIA. Life returned to something like normal.
Then, in 2012, she met Cecilia Robinson and joined forces with Nadia Lim and together the trio started My Food Bag and almost overnight changed both her life and the way the country thought about dinner.
She was 50, but she went for it like she was in her 20s or 30s, as her partners were. She was still on boards, including as chair of AIA, and was still heavily involved in philanthropy, but now had the added burden of running one of New Zealand’s fastest-growing businesses, which went from zero to $100 million revenue in its first three years.
On an average Sunday night, she would say to her nephew, who was living with her at the time: “Okay, tomorrow I am flying to Sydney, and then on Tuesday I’m flying to Melbourne, and then on Wednesday I’m flying to Wellington, and on Thursday I’ll be back in Auckland for dinner. I did that for, I don’t know, a couple of years and then just hit a wall.”
She was in the middle of a board meeting when she collapsed. She was rushed to hospital. Once there, she collapsed again. Scans revealed a cyst in her brain and she was transferred to Auckland Hospital in the middle of the night. Once there, she was told to prepare for brain surgery.
In the morning, a surgeon told her they would hold off, but that if she lost consciousness again, they would have to operate.
Also in the room at that time was a leading neurologist. When the surgeon left, he said: “I don’t know what’s wrong with you Theresa, but it’s not your brain. Do not let them operate. You’ll be very lucky to ever be the same again.”
When the surgeon came back and asked if she would give permission for brain surgery, she said no.
She was told that if the cyst moved or got any bigger it would block her ventricle. She was told: “You’d go to sleep and you would not wake up.”
That was seven years ago.
Doctors were never able to conclusively say what the issue was, but she believes it was burnout. She was so exhausted, she says, she was hardly able to leave the house for a year afterwards.
“The burnout was so severe that I couldn’t rest. It was hard to sleep because when you’re that exhausted, actually you don’t easily relax.”
Towards the end of that year, she spent several weeks at an Indian wellness retreat called Soukya, which is also a favourite destination for King Charles and Queen Camilla. There, they practise a combination of Chinese medicine, Western medicine, and Indian medicine and treatments.
She didn’t love the food, which she says was lacking in protein and too spicy for her. She says, “I don’t think I’d do it again.”
After three weeks of observation, the doctor told her she was basically a Type A personality. He said: “If you stay like that, this will happen again and you’ve still got a long, long life, and you can make an amazing contribution, but you can’t do it all between lunch and morning tea anymore.”
The cyst is still there. She has it measured every few years to see if it’s grown or moved. She has to have it checked if she goes overseas. She has no idea how or why it appeared.
From the time she began working, more than 40 years ago, she has donated a portion of her time and income to causes and organisations she believes in.
“It sounds weird, but in a way, I think being generous actually makes it more likely that you’ll be financially in a good position, rather than less likely, because you have a generous mindset and then you will attract money back.
“Some people will think that’s woo woo, but anyway, it’s good for me.”
One of the biggest recipients of her generosity has been the SPCA, to which she has contributed for decades. As chair of Wellington SPCA in the 2010s, she helped bring about a unification of the organisation’s various regional branches under one umbrella.
She says: “If we hadn’t done that, I think in Covid, it would have been a very bad outcome for a lot of animals in parts of New Zealand. Because it became one SPCA, it got more Government funding, it got more commercial support, it got more ability to make better decisions and be more efficient.”
During our interview, she spoke about her SPCA involvement for nearly 10 minutes, then said: “So my 10 year – it’s more than that now – my 30-year involvement with the SPCA, 10 years of intensively working as well as giving it money has never been documented anywhere. No one’s ever asked me about it.”
Asked why she thought that was, she gave a long answer about being pigeonholed in a theme and all the themes she has running: entrepreneurship, women in corporates, boards she’s on, boards she chairs, her own corporate life, her ongoing involvement with one of the world’s biggest life insurers.
Then, without pausing for breath, she said she wanted to share one more story about philanthropy.
The story was about Sister Zeph, a Christian educator in Pakistan who had a dream to educate girls and a father who believed in the potential of girls. After meeting Zeph over Zoom in 2016, Gattung supported her financially for seven years, contributing hundreds of thousands of dollars to her work. In 2023, Zeph won the Global Teacher Prize, which is sometimes known as the Nobel Prize for teaching, and US$1 million in prize money.
A story is two things: a series of events, and whatever the storyteller wants us to think those events tell us about the world.
Gattung says: “This is a story about my core view, my core belief: anybody can achieve anything if they line up strong intention with their own heart and their own belief set and the role of other people.”
Some people will think that’s woo woo, but anyway, it’s good for her.