Around the
globe, women are leading companies in new and successful directions.
In Japan, Izumi Kobayashi, president of Merrill Lynch Japan Securities,
has made profitable a business that was hemorrhaging losses and
in disarray before she took over.
In France,
Laurence Parisot recently became the first female president of
the country's biggest employers' group, with the goal of overhauling
France's notoriously strict labor laws and "teaching people
to love the market economy." And in the U.S., eBay Inc. CEO
Margaret C. Whitman has built the Web auction company into a global
e-commerce business.
THE JOURNAL
REPORT
See a chart
of the top 50 women, plus the complete Women
to Watch report.
But hold
the applause: While a steadily growing cadre of women are making
their mark in business, their ranks have barely touched broad
swaths of the corporate world. Instead, women business leaders
are largely concentrated in a select group of industries: consumer
products, financial services, retail, publishing and media. Not
surprisingly, these are all businesses with large numbers of women
customers.
"The
more you have a female customer base, the sooner companies in
that industry start paying attention to how many women managers
they have" who can reach those customers, says Ilene H. Lang,
president of Catalyst, the New York research group that tracks
women executives.
This became
evident when The Wall Street Journal sought to identify 50 women
whose talents and positions make them worthy of special attention.
The long list of nominees included some who are already at the
top and some in line to lead; some who are making their mark as
regulators or politicians, and some who have chosen to sit temporarily
on the corporate sidelines.
Finding women
wasn't the problem; selecting among hundreds was.
The Journal
ranked the women based on their potential to make a significant
impact on business in the years ahead. The Journal considered
a variety of factors, such as their influence in business and
their recent accomplishments. Moreover, the Journal considered
the challenges the women face in business, and what their response
to those challenges may mean for their companies and industries.
After much discussion and several rounds of voting among Journal
editors and reporters, the list was narrowed down to the 50 finalists
in this Journal Report.
Their paths
say much about their own abilities -- as well as the hurdles still
facing young women who are just starting business careers.
For one thing,
those at the top still represent a very small percentage among
women employees: While 50.3% all managers and professionals are
women, just 1.4% of Fortune 500 CEOs and 7.9% of Fortune 500 top
earners are women.
What's more,
whatever their industry, virtually all these women rose through
the operations side of business. Yet about 90% of all women managers
are concentrated in staff jobs.
Friendlier
Fields
Clearly,
it's a big advantage for women to work in companies that depend
on female customers and for a CEO who believes that work-force
diversity is a business imperative. More than half of the women
on our list who are already "running the show" or "in
line to lead" work in consumer products, financial services,
media and publishing, or retail.
GETTING
TO THE TOP
PODCAST: More women are making it to the top of big corporations
these days, yet the numbers are still slim. What are the most
important things a woman has to know if she wants to try for the
senior ranks? WSJ's Carol Hymowitz discuss strategies that can
help women succeed, from the importance of getting line experience
to the advantages of job hopping.
Susan Arnold,
vice chairman at Procter & Gamble Co., oversees Clairol, Olay
and the company's other beauty brands world-wide, which generate
roughly a third of the company's revenue. Her boss, P&G chairman
and CEO A.G. Lafley, believes the company's recipe for success
has been to uncover and cater to the habits and tastes of its
mostly female consumers. One way he has pushed this strategy is
to promote women like Ms. Arnold.
Similarly,
Tami Booth Corwin was named president of Rodale Books after she
bought the proposal for "The South Beach Diet" and launched
an innovative subscription-driven Web campaign to sell it. The
book now has an estimated 10 million copies in print in the U.S.
Meanwhile,
women such as Merrill's Ms. Kobayashi, Marion Sandler, co-CEO
of Golden West Financial Corp., Zoe Cruz, acting president of
Morgan Stanley, and Joyce Chang, managing director of J.P. Morgan
Chase & Co., have benefited from a trend in financial services
that began more than two decades ago.
"That's
when a few former bank CEOs looked at their all-white-boy's management
club, realized it didn't reflect their customer base and decided
one of their legacies would be to promote women and minorities,"
says Pat Cook, head of Cook & Co., a boutique executive-search
firm who was named the first female senior vice president at Chemical
Bank in 1981. "And since bankers are sheep, the trend soon
spread throughout commercial banking and then to brokerage and
investment-banking firms."
But the
women on our list are present in more than a few industries. Xie
Qihua, chairwoman of Shanghai Baosteel, China's largest steel producer,
and Linda Cook, executive director, gas and power, at Royal Dutch
Shell PLC, have both climbed the ranks in what are considered traditionally
male-dominated industries.
Carol Bartz, chief executive of Autodesk Inc., links her rise to
the top of a software company to her early interest in math, which,
she says, was never discouraged. She was raised by her grandmother
on a farm in Wisconsin, and in the small rural schools she attended,
"no one ever told me I couldn't do math because I was a girl,"
she says.
She worries
that young women will be excluded from opportunities in burgeoning
software and other technology companies if they are discouraged
from studying math and science. On a recent tour of colleges with
her 17-year-old daughter, she was startled when, at one stop,
"my daughter was assured she could fulfill the math requirement
by taking a course on the history of women in math," she
says. "No one said anything about a history of men in math
course -- or calculus," she adds.
Perception
Problem
Wherever
they work, women business leaders have faced stereotypical thinking
about what they can and can't do well. A recent survey of 296
executives by Catalyst found that men believe women are less skilled
at problem solving, one of the qualities most associated with
effective leaders. And both men and women surveyed said women
are less skilled than men at delegating and "influencing
upward."
The women
to watch in business have challenged these stereotypes partly
by taking on high-risk assignments -- such as turning around a
troubled division that their male colleagues didn't want to run.
Some have steadily climbed the ranks of one company, but many
have zigzagged their way to the top by jumping across companies
and industries to get more and more experience.
Ebay's Ms.
Whitman started her career at P&G after earning an M.B.A.
from Harvard, then became a consultant at Bain & Co., went
next to Walt Disney Co. as a senior vice president in the consumer-product
division and subsequently was president of Stride Rite Corp. and
then president and CEO of Florist Transworld Delivery. Before
being named CEO at eBay, she also was general manager of Hasbro
Inc.'s preschool toy division.
Autodesk's
Ms. Bartz, after earning a computer-science degree at the University
of Wisconsin, worked at Minnesota Mining & Manufacturing Co.,
and then got her big career break, she says, when she became one
of the first women sales managers at Digital Equipment Co. She
then moved to Sun Microsystems Inc. before being named CEO of
Autodesk.
These women
certainly don't share a single management style or lifestyle.
Ms. Arnold is known for her sense of humor and inclusiveness;
Ms. Xie is more formal, and her bottom-line focus has earned her
the nickname China's Iron Lady. But whether they carefully planned
their career moves or are surprised that they've advanced so far,
they share a deep excitement about the chance to run and build
businesses and motivate others. "I'm never bored," says
Ms. Bartz.
--Ms.
Hymowitz is a senior editor for The Wall Street Journal based
in New York
