FORBES 100 most powerful women in the world

For nine years FORBES has ranked the 100 most powerful women in the world. These are the women who adhere to the traditional classifications of power (political and economic might) and those who have risen to the top of the social and cultural landscape. It is our annual snapshot of women who impact the world.

Here's a video of some of the FORBES staff giving some background as to how the list was constructed and their view points on the list itself.


The new class of CEOs: Seven new CEOs seized the corner office this year—and many of them are familiar faces. Marissa Mayer, Google employee No. 20, traded her VP post at the search engine for Yahoo! Meg Whitman, former eBay CEO, is now heading up HP. And Sheri McCoy, edged out of the top job at J& J, is now at Avon. There are also the in-house promotions: Ginni Rometty at IBM, Maria das Gracas Silva Foster of Brazil’s natural gas behemoth Petrobras and Rosalind Brewer, who was promoted to the top of Sam’s Club, making her the first woman and first African American head a Wal-Mart unit. Time Inc., alternately, looked outside its Rock Center headquarters and tapped Laura Lang, former head of Digitas.
Where are the women in tech? Right here.

Tech is a new category to the Power Women list this year as the latest link in the power chain.
Six tech women made the top 25 this year, including Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg (No. 10), Rometty (No. 15) and Google‘s Susan Wojcicki (No. 25). There are 15 tech women in total, including also Cher Wang of HTC (No. 56) and SingTel Group CEO Chua Sock Koong (No. 74).