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Joanne Thomas Yaccato is the president and founder of a Toronto-based consulting firm. This company specializes in helping companies create a critically important gender lens that companies need in order to create authentic products, services and business strategies to attract the attention and loyalty of women consumers. TYG’s innovative work with companies like Royal Bank Financial Group, Avon, Imperial Oil, PetroCan, IKEA, The Home Depot, the B.C. Government and Toyota Canada has proven that there is a straight-line connection between getting it right with women and getting it right with everyone else.

One of Canada's most popular business writers, Joanne uses her personal experience and hilarious misadventures as the backdrop to all of her books. Her bestselling books include the newly-released 10th Anniversary Edition of Balancing Act: A Canadian Woman’s Financial Success Guide and Raising Your Business: A Canadian Woman’s Guide to Entrepreneurship which was nominated for the prestigious National Business Book Award. The 80% Minority: Reaching the Real World of Women Consumers is the first book in Canada to offer the truth behind women consumers and their relationship with corporate Canada. With Joanne’s trademark wry wit and keen powers of observation, The 80% Minority explains the reality of Canadian women’s consumer DNA.

Joanne's newest book, Gender Intelligent Retail Ecology, written with retailing guru Sean McSweeney, is a groundbreaking look at how retailers and service providers can meet the needs of women consumers. Expected release date is September 2008.

Joanne is a regular contributor to Canada’s media including CBC, CTV and the country’s top financial press and national newspapers. She has been nominated for the Governor General’s award, and has received two nominations each for the Ernst & Young’s Entrepreneur of the Year Award and the YWCA’s National Women of Distinction Award.