Jane McCooey once had a profound epiphany about her career, which so far has ventured into the fields of law, tech, and high finance.
It came while she was playing Camogie.
“You don’t really talk about work when you’re there – you just go to train and play,” the Armagh native and Morgan Stanley executive said during our recent interview. “But half the girls that I played with – who I’ve known for years – I honestly didn’t even know what they did for work. I was like, oh my God, you work there? You’ve got that role? What? That’s unbelievable.”
McCooey came to see that within the collective knowledge, experience, and abilities of her fellow athletes was a deep, rich resource that was not being accessed. If these accomplished women all began sharing ideas and making connections, they’d not only go further in their own careers, but help others as well.
“There was no platform for us to celebrate the unbelievable things Irish and Irish-American women as a community were doing in New York and the Tri-State area.”
And so, with a small circle of friends, McCooey launched Women With Ambition, one of several groups with Irish and industry ties in which she is very active. All this while working as Executive Director and Chief Operating Officer for Morgan Stanley’s Global Tech & Data Legal group, which pretty much put her at the center of pivotal 21st Century issues and initiatives – from cybersecurity and privacy to high-tech and high-finance.
That McCooey, who generated networking strategies on a GAA athletic pitch – far from the board room and office – reveals a key ingredient to her success.
“In school they used to call me ‘The Link,’” she says with a laugh. “I always had that ability to organize and corral and motivate people…. You can’t just live in your own head, that’s a killer. You have to make sure you stay connected to other people.”
McCooey is currently wrapping up her first year in a new role as Chief of Staff to the Chief Information Officer of Enterprise Technology & Services at Morgan Stanley, after beginning in Legal at the Fortune 500 financial services company, where she started to work in 2022. Before Morgan Stanley, she spent eight years practicing Antitrust Law at elite international law firm, Davis Polk & Wardwell LLP, where she began in 2013 upon moving to New York City.
With regard to her new role, McCooey explained, “I wanted to do something more strategic – to learn how to run a business at a really big company. My role now is at the intersection of so much change,” she says. “I’m learning about the way that the whole company works – how the infrastructure’s set up, how the technology’s built. Every day is truly fascinating, and there is literally no typical day.”
Like all global companies, Morgan Stanley is currently working to incorporate rapidly-advancing technologies into their daily operations as well as long-term business models. This puts McCooey on the “ground floor,” she says, of changes that “are not just impacting Morgan Stanley, but the entire world.”
And it all began, in McCooey’s words, in “a wee town, not even a town, really, a tiny village called Darkley,” in South Armagh.
McCooey grew up – with a twin sister, named Elizabeth – outside of Keady, just a few miles from the border separating the North from Monaghan, Louth and the rest of the Republic. The area is well known as home to Tommy Makem’s Arts and Community Centre, which opened in 2015 to promote music and culture across Ireland’s many communities.
“We were lucky. We grew up in the later years of the Troubles,” recalls McCooey. “The Good Friday Agreement came (in 1998) when we were still pretty young, so I feel like we were definitely protected.”
And yet, she readily recalls police and military checkpoints, during which cars would be inspected top to bottom for explosives.
“I’d be doing my homework,” McCooey adds with a shrug, “and I’d look out the window and see the police or soldiers prancing through the garden, jumping over the wall.”
McCooey pauses, before she continues: “You wouldn’t even think about it because, unfortunately, these things become so normalized when you don’t know anything else. It was always like, oh, there they are again.”
McCooey credits her parents, Roisin and Frank McCooey, for keeping the family focused on positive things.
“We were always taught that everybody’s the same, that sort of thing. We never really experienced any atrocities luckily. … We went to school, we did sports, and all the other activities.”
McCooey also has positive recollections of a summer spent in Canada with a group of Northern Irish youth from different backgrounds on a cross-community exchange known as The Spirit of Enniskillen.
“We were pretty young to be talking about these heavy issues. They put us all in a room, and had us talk about things. And I’d say: ‘You’re a Protestant, and what do you think? And what would you call Catholics?’ And vice versa. Half the time, honestly, it was hysterical. We were like, ‘You call us that? What?’ There were so many of these ridiculous myths. I still remember … how impactful it was.”
More than 25 years since the Good Friday Agreement, McCooey is part of a generation that has seen fundamental change roll across Northern Ireland.
“Young people today in the North, they don’t really care about all this identity nonsense. They want to know where are the jobs? Any chance of us getting a train or something that works? That’s what they actually care about.”
Growing up, McCooey says she “did everything” alongside her twin sister Elizabeth, who currently lives in County Kerry, where her entrepreneurial skills led her to co-found Aqua Terra Boat Tours with her husband, Brendan Curtin.
“But our parents also encouraged us to have our own personalities and our own interests.”
Both sisters started playing team sports at eight years old, which also happens to be when McCooey began learning important lessons about the broader world.
Some of these lessons were positive.
“It’s so crucial to have that ability to be a team player, or to be a leader. But a leader doesn’t mean being a dictator. Sport is where you’re learning all those skills.”
McCooey became the teammate inclined to bring various factions together. “It’s something I used to do sort of naturally. …just because I enjoyed it. And honestly, if I didn’t do it, no one else would.”
But there are also negatives McCooey recalls about youthful athletics – things she saw later in college, and in the business world.
“The men’s teams always had more. And those inequalities, they might seem insignificant, but they’re important – they’re significant. It’s just not equal, you know? It’s always been something I saw that stayed in the back of my mind.”
Observing these inequities maybe explains why at a young age, McCooey developed an early interest in the law.
“It was early on in school that I was pretty clear I wanted to do law. Did I really know what that meant? Not at all.”
McCooey did know that she “wanted to live and travel and work abroad. … that was just always something I had, those itchy feet.”
School and work have ultimately taken McCooey from her “wee town” in Armagh to Dublin, Canada, France, Cape Cod, Boston, Cambridge, Chicago, and Brussels. By 2013, she was drawn to New York City – by its celebrated energy and opportunities, as well as its infamous cut-throat competition.
Early on, though, it was her organizing and athletic prowess that gained McCooey wilder public attention.
In 2015, The New York Times published a report and photo feature about McCooey and her establishment of a GAA club in the New York-New Jersey area. “The Hoboken Guards are the first camogie team in metropolitan New York in nearly 20 years,” reporter Jessica Bal noted, adding: “While the New York Gaelic Athletic Association has a league of several men’s hurling teams, female members have not had an organized presence since they last won the North American Finals in 1996.”
The Times went on: “The Guards hail from across Ireland – along with a few from the United States – and live throughout New Jersey and New York City. Most met for the first time at the training grounds.”
It wasn’t long before McCooey and the Hoboken Guards (who later changed their name to Liberty Gaels) won the North American County Board Camogie Finals, and celebrated their victory by “dancing a jig on picnic tables in Chicago Gaelic Park and holding their trophy high.”
McCooey, the team Founder and Captain, told the Times: “It was just pure magic. Like a fairy tale.”
McCooey ran the Liberty Gaels Camogie Club for nearly a decade, leading them to win four North American Senior Championship titles and many other accolades, before she stepped down in 2024. During her tenure, she also arranged a fundraiser supporting the women of Afghanistan following the Taliban invasion in August 2021.
Meanwhile, McCooey was working even harder to establish herself as a lawyer in New York City. But some of the same problems she saw decades earlier in youth GAA – men getting more and better opportunities compared to women – were also prevalent in the corporate world.
So, nearly four years ago in February 2022, Women With Ambition (WWA) was born. It began as a small group, technically open to all, but consisting mainly of Irish and Irish American women, at least in the beginning.
“A lot of them had left Ireland. Why would they leave home if not to come here and be the best versions of themselves? They wanted to thrive in their company or industry, but were feeling stuck. It made me question – what help was out there – what advice do they need?”
In a matter of months, McCooey was stunned by how many women were asking about WWA.
“The benefit of meeting people that you probably would not have come across otherwise, and learning what they do, opens a whole other element of possibility (and) new horizons,” she said, adding: “You’re actually giving people a platform to help with their self-promotion, to get them known. They then give back to the network that they’ve built up. There is a significant multiplier effect.”
McCooey says WWA is currently open to anyone “from anywhere and everywhere who feel it aligns with them, and can offer them help.”
Topics at meetings have moved from basics like resumes and LinkedIn posts to personal finance and investing, AI and climate change. A common denominator remains, however – closing gaps in the business world, where men and women are viewed differently, and view themselves differently.
This includes encouraging women to try sports, which men are encouraged to do early on, thus expanding their social and professional networks. So McCooey and WWA set up a Golf Society and host regular lessons and golf outings, so women can at least learn the rules, etiquette, and get exposed to the networking possibilities.
“When people see what a fella does to promote himself, people are like, ‘My God, he’s a real gunner, he’s going to go places.’ Whereas if a girl does it, they’re like, ‘Oh my God, look at your one.’ So we do need to work on changing that mindset, and ensuring people respect the ambition of women.”
Then there is what McCooey and other business experts call “imposter syndrome”– when even very accomplished people take such a dim view of their own abilities, it inhibits their advancement.
“That feeds into the cultural aspect of it – the female, but also the Irish cultural aspect. Many women) don’t want to promote themselves because they worry that others will think they are egotistical, all this nonsense. If you do not discuss your achievements and ambitions, how do you enhance your personal brand and your self-promotion?”
McCooey is Co-Chair of Morgan Stanley’s Philanthropy & Giving Back Pillar of the Women’s Business Alliance. She is also Co-Chair of the Young Partners Board of the Irish American Partnership, and Global Ambassador for Awaken Angels. She was on the New York Executive Board of the Cross Border Orchestra of Ireland, which came out of the Northern Ireland peace process to unite young people through music.
Last year, McCooey was also one of 28 leaders selected for the Centre for Democracy and Peace Fellowship Programme, which allowed her to return home and meet with leaders in the arts, politics, and business and contribute to a shared vision for Northern Ireland’s future. Earlier this year, she was awarded second place as the Image PwC International Businesswoman of the Year 2025 in Dublin.
All of which begs the question: How could such an obviously accomplished person possibly see herself as some kind of “imposter?”
“But that’s just it!” she says. “It’s a never ending battle against that feeling of always believing that wasn’t good, or this desire to be a constant perfectionist. You can’t really enjoy your successes then, because you believe it could have been better, or I should have done something better. That’s always been and still is an internal battle for me. … I was starting to get crippled by it, and so WWA was also born from personal necessity.”
Now, looking ahead to a new year – and a challenging, exciting future – McCooey draws from her own decades of experience, as well as the collective wisdom of co-workers seated beside her at Morgan Stanley.
“It’s amazing to be in those rooms, listening to people who have really seen it all,” she says. “The role that I currently have now is in line with this overall ethos I have, regarding how important it is for people to get out of their bubbles. You have to see what else is going on around you – try, test and taste a bit of as much as you can.”
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