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Arianna Huffington: 'We need a third women's revolution'

Arianna Huffington is as much a media mogul as she is a feminist icon. Two weeks away from celebrating the 10-year anniversary of The Huffington Post, its Editor in Chief is not shy about looking back on both her successes and shortcomings as a woman balancing family, career and her personal well being.

“Things have improved [for women in the workforce] but not sufficiently,” Huffington said in a recent interview with Yahoo Finance. “We need a third women's revolution. The first one was the right to vote. The second was giving us access to every job and the top of every profession… The third is women saying we don’t just want to be at the top of the world, we want to change the world.”

In the opening scene in her bestselling book, "Thrive," Huffington describes the moment when, in 2007, she collapsed in her office from exhaustion, breaking her cheekbone on her desk as she went down.

In the year since her book was released, she went on to launch a star-studded conference tour based on the strategies she used to get a grip on her professional and personal life. In May, she’ll take that message to Oprah’s audience via a six-week online course aimed at helping women struggling to cope with sleep deprivation and stress.

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To get there, Huffington says women need to not only take leadership roles but change the way leaders traditionally manage their workload: at the expense of their personal well-being.

And no woman is in a better position to demonstrate a healthier way to juggle career and personal life than newly announced presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, Huffington says. Clinton broke records and logged nearly one million miles over the course of her four-year tenure as Secretary of State. Some questioned whether her rigorous schedule came at the expense of her health. In late 2012, Clinton fainted at her home in Washington, D.C., suffered a concussion and was later treated for a blood clot. Her camp said Clinton was sick with the flu and dehydrated before the fall.

“When [Clinton] left her job as Secretary of State and [the New York Times] asked her what she most wanted, she said she most wanted to be untired,” Huffington says. “She needs to demonstrate to all of us there has to be another way to do it. There has to be another way to run a presidential campaign.”

Huffington has made headlines for her own efforts to lead by example. She famously installed nap rooms at HuffPo’s New York City headquarters and doesn't expect employees to respond to work emails after work hours.  Despite owning three iPhones herself, she still bans cellphones from her bedroom at night. 

“It’s not sustainable for people to be expected to be connected to their devices, answering their emails at all hours every day,” she says. “I learned lessons about thriving the hard way."

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Note: A previous version of this article referred to an email curfew at Huffington Post; there is no curfew.