5 Inspirational Female Business Leaders You Must Know About

By CIO LOOK

The discussion about the lack of women in STEM rampages on, but there are other industries in yearning need of more female representation. STEM is a curriculum based on the idea of educating students in four specific disciplines viz., science, technology, engineering, and mathematics which are studied in an interdisciplinary and applied approach.

Statistics today show that more women are obtaining graduate business degrees from US business schools and yet are struggling to be on equal grounds with their male counterparts in the corporate realm.

However, being the persistent, passionate, and uncompromising individuals they have always been, women have ceaselessly proved that they can not and will not be disregarded.

Indra Nooyi

Indra Nooyi is a classic example of a woman who worked her way up a male-dominated field. She was widely discussed across top business magazines for her efforts to introduce design thinking into strategy, when at PepsiCo. Former PepsiCo CEO, Indra Nooyi made it to the headlines recently when she was added to Amazon’s board of Directors. It’s important that we go for more female representation on boards, as research shows that having a more diverse and broader Board of Directors can make a business more successful.

Indira Nooyi is consistently ranked among the worlds’ 100 most powerful women. Receiving a master’s degree in Public and Private Management from the Yale School of Management in 1978, she worked for Motorola and Asea Brown Bovari before joining PepsiCo in 1994, working her way up until she became the fifth CEO in the company’s 44-year history. Indra Nooyi serves as a role model for women in business, as well as other industries.

Mary Barra

Mary Barra is one of the few female leaders in the auto industry who is the first female CEO of a major global automaker called General Motors Company. The 57-year-old Mary Barra received the highest compensation amongst any leader of a Detroit Big Three automaker which was $22 million in 2017. Barra was recently listed as Number 5 on Forbes’ list of The World’s 100 Most Powerful Women.

Mary Teresa Barra started working for the General Motors Company at just 18 years old as an electrical engineering co-op student with the GM Institute of Technology, inspired by her parents to pursue her passion for STEM.

She was sent by the company to Stanford Business School to study MBA when they saw her skills and potential to become a leader. After graduation, she continued to keep working her way up the company, holding multiple positions such as Executive Assistant to the CEO, Manager of the global HR department, and the Senior Vice-President for global product development before becoming CEO in 2014.

During her career at GM, she pushed the company to new heights, getting them involved into tech space with modern ideas such as automated driverless technologies. General Motors is one of the only two global businesses that have no gender pay gap, an agenda that was pushed by Barra herself during her long journey with the company.

Gillian Tans

Gillian Tans was the highest-paid CEO in the online travel industry. Booking.com is a popular website which almost everyone has heard about or even used to book flight tickets or even hotel rooms.

Gillian had progressed the company’s operations and sales across more than 224 countries and territories, playing an important part in the company’s growth. Booking.com went from just a small footprint in Amsterdam to opening a second office in Barcelona since joining in 2002.

Tans is very passionate about getting more women involved in the technology industry. She told Travel Weekly, “Technology is one of the key drivers of social and economic change, and as the CEO of Booking.com, I am able to play my part in that..”[MORE]

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