Fortune Profiles Powerful Women CEOs of the Year

By Jennifer Hopfinger
October 20, 2006 04:15 PM

Fortune magazine is calling 2006 the Year of the Most Powerful Woman CEO. Its October 16th issue features “The New CEOs” on its cover — female chief executives taking charge at some of the country’s largest corporations.

“PepsiCo. Xerox. eBay. ADM. Kraft Foods. Sara Lee. Avon. The list of brand-name companies with women chief executives is longer and more impressive than ever, after a year of stunning breakthroughs in corner-office hiring,” writes Patricia Sellers in Fortune’s cover story, “It’s good to be the boss.”

The magazine also lists its annual ranking of the 50 most powerful women in business. The top seven positions on this year’s list are held by chief executives. Some you’ve heard of — Oprah Winfrey, of course, in the No. 8 slot — and some maybe you haven’t.

Sellers focuses her article on Indra Nooyi, whose promotion to chief executive of PepsiCo made big news in August; Irene Rosenfeld, who left Kraft to join PepsiCo and then claimed the top spot at her former company; and Pat Woertz, a long-time oil exec who left Chevron to take over ADM. All three make the top five of Fortune’s list of leading businesswomen.

In an online supplement to the cover story package, writer Serge Michel profiles six businesswomen taking the communist-turned-capitalist world by storm in “From Russia with Love.” None of them made the Most Powerful Women list, but they’re leading the charge of women in Russia’s business ranks. The article includes Aliona Doletskaya, the editor of Russian Vogue; Olga Sloutsker, the former Russian fencing champion who runs a chain of luxury fitness clubs; and Olga Dergunova, a former Microsoft executive who launched the country’s first private software business.

Reading the article, one can’t help but think of another driven and committed Russian woman who went into business — the business of journalism — and received a death sentence instead of accolades for her efforts. Investigative journalist Anna Politkovskaya, known for her reporting on human-rights abuses in Chechnya and murdered in a contract-style killing in her apartment building this month, was buried while this issue appeared on newsstands.

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