Fletcher School graduate Meg Reilly uses skills learned on the ocean to mentor women and strengthen teams
Meg Reilly advocates for more inclusive teams, in sailing and business. Photo: Courtesy of Meg Reilly
In 2013, Meg Reilly quit her job to sail around the world. The recent business school graduate was working at Young & Rubicam, a global advertising agency based in New York City, when she read an article about an around-the-world sailboat race crewed by amateurs. Despite never having sailed before, Reilly left her career, found a corporate sponsor, and signed up to spend a year circumnavigating the globe in a 70-foot yacht called the Henri Lloyd.
During the 40,000-mile journey, she took charge of provisioning and meal planning, managed the crew’s media presence, and eventually became an assistant watch leader, helping to manage part of the team and keep the boat on course. At ports around the world, she visited schools to connect with and inspire youth and deliver sports equipment donated by her sponsor.
“It was life changing,” said Reilly, F24, who has spent the last decade working in the sailing industry.
Sailing is one of the few professional sports where men and women compete together. But men still typically outnumber women on racing boats, and women often find themselves without leadership opportunities or pigeonholed into specific jobs.
“Women have not always been welcome in these spaces, or they’ve been restricted to ‘female’ roles, like being in the galley to cook food or repairing the sails because they know how to work a sewing machine,” Reilly said. It’s also challenging to prevent harassment and assault—people live and work in extremely close quarters on boats, and the culture of sailing involves a lot of drinking at port. “A big cultural shift needs to happen within the sailing industry in order to make sailing an equal playground for men and women—the boats and the ocean have allowed it, but we as people haven’t.”
Meg Reilly and her husband run Ocean Racers, a business that offers charters, delivers boats, and trains people interested in sailing races. Photo: Ocean Racers
On Reilly’s trip around the world, the most experienced sailors on board were all men. They helped her develop her skills as a sailor, giving her opportunities to practice steering and navigation, and supported her growth as a leader on the boat. At the time, that experience didn’t strike her as unusual. But as she continued in the sailing industry, purchasing a 40-foot sailboat with her husband (whom she met on board the Henri Lloyd) and launching a business training other racers, offering charters, and delivering boats, she met more female sailors and saw the challenges they were facing.
“I started to realize that a lot of other women didn’t have the opportunities that I had, and they didn’t have that encouragement from men or women,” Reilly said. “I wanted to fill that void.”
Reilly started looking for ways to lift up other women in the sport. She advocated for more mixed-gender sailing teams and worked to ensure that her own race teams had equal numbers of men and women. She led several “Women’s Offshore Weeks” on board her boat, creating a safe environment for women to build confidence and skills sailing offshore with an all-female crew, and led workshops and panels about the challenges that women in the industry face.
Reilly also volunteered as a mentor with The Magenta Project, a global nonprofit working to ensure equity and inclusion for women in sailing. She was then hired as the organization’s executive director in 2022, expanding its mentorship programs and curriculum to offer both online and in-person opportunities and creating new partnerships to develop more female leadership in ocean racing. One of the mentees, Cole Brauer, recently became the first American woman to complete a nonstop solo race around the world.
Reilly stepped down from her position at the Magenta Project at the beginning of 2025, but she has continued to run Ocean Racers with her husband, manage brand ambassador programs for several sailing-related companies, and serve as the marketing chair for the annual St. Maarten Heineken Regatta, a four-day race event that attracts more than 20,000 visitors to the Caribbean island.
During the summer, she and her husband keep their boat in the Long Island Sound (between New York and Connecticut), living on board part time. In the winter, they sail down to St. Maarten for the racing season in the Caribbean. Reilly logged into her second-to-last course at Tufts during that transit, connecting to her class from the middle of the Atlantic Ocean via satellite.
Now, with her master’s degree in global business administration from The Fletcher School, Reilly plans to bring the skills in team-building, mentorship, and advancing gender equity that she has developed on the water to the international business community.
In her view, the sailing world and the business world both need concrete steps to create more equitable and inclusive environments, mentorship pipelines for long-term success, and high performance from teams in high-pressure situations. Her experience at Fletcher—including classes on sustainable business dynamics and leadership development and a capstone project helping a global chocolate brand evaluate its supply chain—has deepened her strategic thinking.
“I love finding actionable solutions and creating inclusive teams and cultures, because that's what I do on the water,” Reilly said. “And that's what I can bring to every business.”
