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Nov

27

WSJ’s 50 Women to Watch 2007 report


The portal to the Wall Street Journal’s 50 Women to Watch is here.

The article is here.

The sortable chart is here. Two women from P & G are on the list, but otherwise, no one from Ohio jumped out at me (there was no state category so I’m not 100% sure on whether there are others from Ohio).  A couple of women from GE and the top woman is from WellPoint, though no other health care concerns contributed, unless you count Pfizer and DuPont. The finance industry is well-represented.

Here’s the White House Project’s take on the implications:

The Wall Street Journal has released its list of the 50 Women to Watch of 2007, women they believe “have the potential to make a significant impact on business in the year ahead.” We want to congratulate two of our SheSource.org experts who are among this prestigious list of movers and shakers: Erin Callan, who will become CFO of Lehman Brothers, a Corporate Council founding member, on December 1, and Anna Burger, Secretary-Treasurer of the Service Employees International Union.

The WSJ’s list includes Presidents, CEOs and Executive VPs of major corporations, which makes the omission of women on another recently released list hard to ignore. Only one of Fortune’s 25 Most Powerful People in Business is a woman–Indra Nooyi, Chairman and CEO of PepsiCo and speaker at our 2007 EPIC awards-and as the WSJ reports, the number of women in top executive jobs has remained stagnant in recent years. Women still hold only 16.4% of Fortune 500 corporate-officer jobs — positions of vice president or higher that require board approval.

The White House Project’s Corporate Council is working to reverse this trend. The Corporate Council is our innovative initiative to close the leadership gap in the corporate arena, bringing together senior executive women who are active agents of change within their organizations. The Council builds on the urgent need of companies to identify talented women leaders for top positions by making visible the extraordinary group of women who are ready and able to transform the way business is led in the 21st century.

As for why we need women in these roles, I swear I am going to finish that post’s draft this week!

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By Jill Miller Zimon at 6:23 pm November 27th, 2007 in Business, Media, Women 

Comments

2 Responses to “WSJ’s 50 Women to Watch 2007 report”

  1. 1 Becky on November 27th, 2007 7:17 pm

    I’ve got this in a stack on my desk … been meaning to blog about it. Also caught the PepsiCo CEO on C-SPAN a while back and have been meaning to blog about that too. I’m so far behind.

    Initial thoughts:

    Of the six panelists interviewed in one of the articles, two had husbands who were stay-at-home-dads. The others? I’m guessing they pay others to help with child care. In other words, they’re not changing the structure of the workplace (all the work/life balance BS). They’re simply swapping roles.

    As for Pepsi … my jaw dropped to hear her talk about fighting childhood obesity …………. by selling more Pepsi products to children. I sometimes wonder, do these people really believe what they say? Or do they say what they say because they’re paid to say it?

    Sigh.

  2. 2 Jill Miller Zimon on November 28th, 2007 12:08 am

    Becky – you raise a really good point about whether the structure or the conditions under which women could get to these places has changed or is changing. I’ve read recently about how women are not going into law or law school as much anymore – and that has got to be in part because of the workplace, no? Sure it has to do with our choices, but still – we make choices due to options or lack of options, yes?

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