Dive Brief:
- IBM CEO Ginni Rometty moved up to fourth place in Fortune's annual Most Powerful Women in business list to become the highest ranked woman leader at an enterprise technology company. Facebook's Sheryl Sandberg, Oracle's Safra Catz, Google's Ruth Porat and YouTube's Susan Wojcicki also inked spots in the top 10.
- Few major technology companies are limited to the confines of one country though. In Fortune's international rankings, top women executives in technology included China General Technology President Li Dang, Alibaba CFO Maggie Wei Wu, Wolters Kluwer Chairman and CEO Nancy McKinstry and SAP Co-president of Global Customer Operations Adaire Fox-Martin.
- Leaders were selected based off the size, health and direction of the leader's business, their career history and trajectory and their social and cultural influence. The rankings have compiled annually for the last two decades to highlight influential women at the top of big business.
Dive Insight:
Growth and representation in female leadership at top companies saw lackluster improvement in 2018. The pool of women CEOs in Fortune 500 companies shrank this year from 32 to 24, and Fortune noted a lack of diversity in C-suites is mirrored in the MPW lists.
The U.S. and international rankings for 2018 only had a handful of leaders at predominantly technology companies, and even fewer for enterprise-specific companies. Defense, financial, energy and retail company leaders made up the majority of Fortune's list.
In rankings of powerful CEOs or other executives, leaders from technology companies such as Jeff Bezos, Tim Cook or Sundar Pichai frequently dominate top spots. But low representation of women in the field means that leadership lists of women generally include fewer technology companies in the ranks.
Within the technology companies group, many of the faces from last year's list carried over to 2018's rankings. One notable exception was 2017's No. 7 Meg Whitman, the former CEO of HPE who stepped down last November.
