Katty Kay
Award-Winning Journalist and Anchor | Co-author, Womenomics and The Confidence Code
Katty Kay is an award-winning journalist and news anchor who brings an instinctively global perspective to her observations on American politics and global affairs. She spent nearly 30 years with BBC News as a reporter and then news anchor, where she reported on six US elections, Washington politics, financial crashes, world trouble spots, and more. Kay is also a regular contributor and frequent guest host on MSNBC’s Morning Joe. As a speaker, panel moderator, or interviewer, Kay’s global perspective helps audiences cut through complex issues and see them in valuable context.
Kay’s career with the BBC began in Zimbabwe in 1990, when she started filing reports for BBC World Service radio. From there, she covered the end of apartheid in South Africa. Kay then went on to work as a BBC correspondent in London and Tokyo, reporting on stories including the Kobe earthquake and the Japanese economic recession. She joined The Times’ Washington bureau before returning to the BBC in 2002 until her departure in June 2021.
Kay also writes on the art and science of self-assurance in women and girls. Helping women turn thoughts into action and master a more confident mindset is one of her passions, which drove her to co-author, with Claire Shipman, four New York Times’ bestselling books: Womenomics, The Confidence Code, The Confidence Code for Girls, and Living the Confidence Code. Their first two bestsellers focus on women, success, and work, inspiring women to take control, dream big, and discover a different way of weaving work into their lives. Their follow-up books inspired women to understand that confidence — the lynchpin of success — is a choice.
Following this, Kay co-authored three more New York Times bestselling books with Claire Shipman and JillEllyn Riley: The Confidence Code for Girls: Taking Risks, Messing Up, and Becoming Your Amazingly Imperfect, Totally Powerful Self; the follow-up, The Confidence Code for Girls Journal: A Guide to Embracing Your Amazingly Imperfect, Totally Powerful Self; and her most recent Living the Confidence Code: Real Girls, Real Stories, Real Confidence. These empowering, entertaining guides gives girls the essential yet elusive code to becoming bold, brave, and fearless.
On the funside, Kay had the distinction of being immortalized in pop culture in 2018 when her name was the answer to a question on Jeopardy. In the same week, she was portrayed in a skit on Saturday Night Live, which satirized a moment from MSNBC’s Morning Joe program.