Meet Australia’s 50 most powerful women in business - Women's Agenda

Meet Australia’s 50 most powerful women in business

Today The Australian’s monthly business magazine The Deal has published a special issue featuring inaugural list of Australia’s 50 Most Powerful Women in Business. It’s impeccably timed.

Just this week we have been reminded how few few female CEOsthere are in Australia and that the pay gap for women in the highest levels of management is approaching 45%. 

Do we need to hear from the women defying the odds in corporate Australia? Absolutely.  

The list includes women from a wide range of sectors, including finance, banking, mining and technology and seeks to draw attention to senior women who are at, or approaching, C-suite level. It includes women in chief executive roles but also includes women in the leadership pipeline poised to take over these roles in future.

The Deal’s editor Glenda Korporaal spoke to Women’s Agenda about her decision to compile the list and what she hopes it will achieve.

“There is a debate constantly going on in Australia about whether there are more women moving up the ranks in our corporate world,” she said.

“We have individuals like Gail Kelly who get a lot of public attention, but I wanted people to see that there are actually a huge number of women from all different sectors moving up through the leadership ranks and ready to take over.”

Korporaal said she needed the list to be substantial enough to show just how many women there are in senior ranks across all industries.

“Someone in the office said to me, ‘why don’t you just do a list of ten?’ but ten is not enough. By doing 50, I could show that there are women coming up in a broad range of areas,” Korporaal said.

“In the list of 50, you can see that there are women running two of Australia’s biggest airports. You wouldn’t hear about those women if we stopped at ten.”

So how did The Deal choose the 50 women? How did they decided who are the most powerful women in business?

Korporaal said she looked at women who were heading up divisions in various organisations, women reporting to chief executives, and women running the influential companies in Australia rather than just looking at the largest companies.

But she also had another criteria: If these women picked up the phone and called the prime minister, would he take their call?

“Gina Rinehart is Australia’s wealthiest woman and I firmly believe she is the most powerful woman in business in this country. I also think if Tony Abbott got a phone call from her, he would pick it up,” she said.

“If you were the prime minister, you would want to pick up the phone if any of the women at the top of this list rang you.”

Korporaal said she thinks things are improving for women in business, but that more has to be done to encourage that progress.

“The business world is very focused on getting women on boards, which is important, but it allows people to avoid addressing the deeper structural problems,” she said.

“Women on boards can be used as a quick fix. A company can point to two or three women on its board as evidence that it is making progress, but it doesn’t actually face the very difficult challenge of figuring out how to encourage women to stay in the workforce and how to encourage them to aspire to be the next Gail Kelly. Women need a way to move upwards from boards.”

She said that encouraging women to progress involves addressing issues like affordable childcare, paid parental leave and unconscious bias.

“There is no silver bullet and it is made harder by the fact that we are in a low growth environment and everybody is trying to do more with less, but despite that companies need to understand the importance of paid parental leave and childcare,” she said.

“There are so many complex issues holding women back and we need to look at all of them closely, and properly unpack them, in order to sustain progress.”

Korporaal hopes that by demonstrating how many women are succeeding across all industries, lists like Australia’s 50 Most Powerful Women in Business will help to encourage women to aspire to senior leadership roles themselves.

“The more we identify and point to the people doing well, the more women are encouraged to aspire to those positions and the more society can see just how many talented and deserving women we have,” she said.

“We have to actively look for these women and draw attention to them.”

One thing Korporaal said she did find encouraging when compiling her list was that a lot of newly listed companies had a number women in senior leadership roles, and said she hopes this points to a broader trend of new companies installing women from the outset.

Korporaal also said the list includes a number of future Gail Kellys – women poised to take over the CEO role when it next becomes available. Watch this space.

These are the top 10 women on the list.  

1.       Gina Rinehart, Chair Hancock Prospecting

2.       Catherine Livingstone, Chair Telstra

3.       Alison Watkins, CEO Coca-Cola Amatil

4.       Katie Page, CEO Harvey Norman

5.       Susan Lloyd-Horwitz, CEO Mirvac

6.       Diane Smith-Gander, Chair Transfield Services

7.       Kerrie Mather, CEO Sydney Airport Holdings

8.       Jayne Hrdlicka, CEO Jetstar

9.       Elizabeth Bryan Chair, Caltex Australia

10.    Naomi Milgrom, Executive Chair Sussan Group

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