100 Women We Love: Jennifer Cast

After banging out a couple degrees from Yale and Stanford, Jennifer Cast began her career in marketing/management by helping a little 100-employee company called Amazon.com become a worldwide e-commerce force with a staff of more than 7,000, as its vice president of books, music, video and digital businesses. In her spare time, she’s served on the board of Lambda Legal, the board of Freedom to Marry, and recently as co-chair of the Finance Committee for Washington United for Marriage, where she secured the single largest individual marriage donation to date: $2.5 million from Amazon’s founder/president Jeff Bezos and his wife MacKenzie. During the November election, Cast helped pass Referendum 74, the ballot initiative that made Washington the first state on the West Coast to legalize marriage equality through a vote by the people—and all this while raising eight-year-old twin boys with partner Liffy Franklin. Cast believes if we’re to achieve real equality across the board, coming out is only half the battle: “Staying out—continuing to help the people in your life understand the joys and challenges of living life as an LGBT person—is the key to winning broad equality.” –QW