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When you daydream about your future life and career, what do you picture? Earning a paycheck while improving gender equality across the globe? Waking up every morning feeling excited to walk into the office? What about joining the elite group of women who are CEOs?
According to a 2016 study by Catalyst, only 22 CEOs out of all Fortune 500 companies are women. These 22 women not only deserve applause for beating the odds and succeeding in male-dominated businesses, but also because they are inspirations to women around the world.
Need some new career #goals? Keep reading.
As a woman, have you ever felt like the automatic underdog for a promotion? Marissa Mayer knows that feeling. In fact, Business Insider reports that Ross Levinsohn imagined his name posted on the Yahoo! CEO office door – until Marissa Mayer earned the position instead. Levinsohn found comfort, however, in losing to an “icon.”
Mayer is a self-professed geek in deluxe, stylish clothing who doesn’t mind flashing her wealth by living in the elegant penthouse of the Four Seasons Hotel. She is also a mother of three, an engineer and the CEO of a multi-billion dollar company. By today’s standards, all Mayer needs to earn the title of “Superwoman” is a crown and tights.
Despite all this, Mayer’s career path hasn’t been as perfect as you might think. Despite a stunning start at Google (where she worked for 13 years before joining Yahoo!), in 2010 Mayer was “demoted” from Google’s search organization to Google Maps. Some blame too much focus on Google’s users and too little office ambition; others say that she had too much ambition (for a female, in particular).
Despite this, Mayer viewed her work from 2010-2012 as preparation for a bigger job, which just happened to be the CEO of Yahoo! Since then, Mayer has shown that a woman can not only be a CEO (while having children) but also “have the time of [her] life” doing it.
That can of Pepsi may taste extra refreshing once you know that a woman serves as PepsiCo’s CEO. Indra Nooyi was born in India, where she completed her bachelor’s degree. The National Women’s History Museum reports that after working a challenging position at Johnson & Johnson – she was responsible for introducing sanitary napkins to India, which were banned from advertisements – she realized that to succeed in business, she needed another degree in her tool belt.
That’s when Yale School of Management entered her life. After graduating, she didn’t waste any time chasing after her business dreams, working first at the Boston Consulting Group, then as a senior executive at Motorola before becoming the Senior Vice President of Corporate Strategy at Asea Brown Boveri.
Looking for a sign that you’re killing it at your latest job? For Nooyi, that sign appeared in the 1990s when corporate headhunters offered her positions at some of the world’s largest companies. PepsiCo was one of them and Nooyi slowly climbed the ranks from Senior Vice President of Corporate Strategy to Chief Financial Officer to CEO in 2006. She’s only the fifth CEO in PepsiCo’s 44-year history, but she should be number one in your eyes!
Have you ever found comfort in a bowl of Campbell Soup when sick? Now you can look for inspiration in its CEO, Denise Morrison. While most families probably have a jar for loose change, Morrison grew up with a “job jar” where family chores would be entered. Morrison and her sisters could negotiate and trade jobs during the week, but all of the work had to be finished by the weekend. Thus, she learned to be business savvy while scrubbing and sweeping.
Morrison knew she wanted to run a company from a very young age and she wasn’t afraid to hide her ambition. Instead, she shared her goal of being a CEO with The Wall Street Journal during an interview about her family. In Morrison’s mind, having a plan – and the guts to do everything you can to make it come true – is the key to success. At the same time, she also admits that career building is a learning process, like the moment she realized building work relationships is “serious business.”
Not sure how to get where you want to be? Morrison shared with The Wall Street Journal that she constantly “looked at [her] career as, ‘Where have I been? Where am I now? And where am I going? And what are the right assignments to get there?’”
Do you believe that you can never gain power if you never change companies? Think again and think about Barbara Rentler’s rise to CEO status. According to Fortune, in 2014, Barbara Rentler became CEO of Ross Stores, as well as the 24th CEO of a Fortune 500 company.
Rentler joined Ross in 1986 and held a variety of merchandising jobs. By 2009, however, she rose to President and Chief Merchandising Officer at the Ross Dress for Less banner. Fewer than six years later, she earned her position at the top of the business.
Of course, her promotion wasn’t just roses and butterflies; it was also an assignment to revive the discount brand. Only one year later, Rentler boasted a 10 percent increase in overall sales and plans to open 70 new brand-name stores and 20 discount stores in 2017. As for Ross? It, along with similar retailers, is predicted to grow six to eight percent in the next five years.
After reading about Mary Barra, you will have a new favorite comeback to the saying, “Cars are just a guy thing.” Mary Barra made history in 2014 by becoming the first female CEO of a major global automaker – in this case, General Motors Corporation.
Barra’s relationship with General Motors began at a young age when she was just a student at the General Motors Institute. After graduating with a Bachelor of Science degree in electrical engineering, she went to the Stanford Graduate School of Business with help from a GM fellowship.
If you’re not sure how to build a varied résumé while working with the same company, just peek at Barra’s, which includes positions ranging from Vice President of Global Human Resources to Executive Director of Competitive Operations Engineering in 2013 to Executive VP of Global Product Management. In 2015, Fortune magazine featured Barra as one of the “50 Most Powerful Women in Business.” And, after learning about Barra’s background, it’s easy to understand why.
Overall, it’s wonderful to look at Barra and all these other inspirational women and picture yourself receiving that same Fortune feature someday. As these five women show, you can care about more things than just fashion; you can be business-savvy too.
