“The women on our list, “GC4W Top Female CEOs” are challenging the status quo and the role of women in the workplace, while inspiring the next generation to follow their footsteps in creating a world where women leaders are to be expected” ~ Lilian Ajayi-Ore, CEO and Founder, Global Connecions for Women Foundation.
With a rather slow growth in the number of women CEOs in the world (year after year), the women represented on this list are deserving of the recognition. Their individual stories are one that underscores the notion that gender plays very little role in how one can efficiently run successful global businesses.
Read inspiring stories of these powerful women on GC4W Women in Leadership News page.
Additionally, did you know that on the 2017 Fortune 500 List of CEOs, only 6.4% were women? The percentage of women running companies in the Fortune 500 is still solidly in the single digits, but the proportion is slowly growing, and in 2017 it reached an all-time high.
Fortune Magazine released its 2017 Fortune 500 list, which ranks major U.S. companies by their fiscal 2016 revenues, and 32 of the companies, or 6.4 percent, were run by female CEOs. Fortune reports that the number was the highest proportion yet seen in the 63-year history of the list. In 2016, we had 21 women CEOs on the list, whereas, in 2014 there were 24.
The Fortune 500 list, which includes private and public companies, has more female CEOs than the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index, which had 29 female CEOs as of April, according to a list compiled by the nonprofit firm Catalyst. Though the lists are different, the bumper crop of female CEOs named to run Fortune 500 companies last year is worth noting, given that in the year prior, only one woman was named CEO at an S&P 500 firm.
The Percentage of Female CEOs in the Fortune 500 Drops to 4% in the past year.
Women run seven of the country’s very largest companies, the Fortune 100, including Mary Barra at General Motors, Virginia “Ginni” Rometty at IBM, Indra Nooyi at PepsiCo and Marillyn Hewson at Lockheed Martin.
That may be one reason executive compensation experts say, that the median female CEO, surprisingly, makes more than her male peers. While the explanation for why is unclear — it could, of course, simply be due to better performance, or companies could pay a “diversity premium” for a female CEO — the median female CEO made $13.1 million in 2016, compared with $11.4 million for the median male CEO.
Read more on washingtonpost.com.
