This blog is no longer updated but it remains open as an archive.
The 'Women at the Top' blog is part of a series of online and print publications that focuses on women's achievements in business. With up-to-date news and incisive analysis, the blog will provoke discussion on the role of the world's most prominent businesswomen. www.ft.com/womenblog
For more Women at the Top news, video interviews and other features, visit www.ft.com/womenatthetop
Liz Bolshaw
Liz Bolshaw is a business journalist and editor. She has been a successful book publisher, online editor, magazine editor and publisher.
She was launch editor of the Europe-wide online community Entrepreneur Country, has published magazines for PwC, 3i, dunhill and Bafta, and launched The Sharp Edge, a magazine for and about entrepreneurs, with Duncan Bannatyne. She is a regular contributor to Thomson Reuters’ Venture Capital Journal.
Her last project for the Financial Times was as editor of the paper’s Business Education magazine.
Rebecca Knight
Rebecca Knight is a freelance journalist based in Boston. She writes regularly for the FT on business education, entrepreneurship, and management.
Andrew Hill
Andrew Hill is an associate editor and the management editor of the FT. He was City editor of the FT and editor of the daily Lombard column on British business and finance from September 2006 to December 2010.
He was the FT’s financial editor from June 2005 to September 2006, with overall responsibility for coverage of companies and markets. Before becoming financial editor, he was the FT’s comment & analysis editor, in charge of the paper’s opinion and features pages.
From 1999 to 2003, he was the FT’s New York bureau chief. He joined the FT in 1988 and has also worked as foreign news editor, UK companies reporter and correspondent in Brussels and Milan.
Pino Bethencourt
Pino Bethencourt is a professor and leadership expert at IE Business School in Madrid. She is also an author and executive coach.
Lynda Gratton
Lynda Gratton is professor of management practice at London Business School.
Linda Tarr-Whelan
Linda Tarr-Whelan, former ambassador to the UN commission on the status of women, is a Demos distinguished senior fellow.
Glass ceilings starting to crack across Europe
A recent study by Washington-based Corporate Women Directors International shows the impact of quotas on increasing the diversity of company boards in Europe. (more…)
Women are the key to unlocking Africa’s economic growth, says new report
A new report from Ernst & Young, published this week, brings together a wide range of data and adds new insight into the potential of women in Africa to boost economic growth, increase levels of education and improve standards of governance in public life. (more…)
Shareholder muscle lends its weight to board diversity
It is not the first time that the diversity debate has moved from the executive to the owners of the UK’s largest companies, but this week’s launch of an investor action group adds muscle to that discussion. (more…)
To an outsider Germany might seem like a place where women could easily fill high-powered positions, writes Rebeka Shaid. After all, the country is governed by chancellor Angela Merkel, who Forbes recently crowned “the world’s most powerful woman”. Yet last year the German Institute for Economic Research found that over 90 per cent of the nation’s top-100 companies did not appoint one single woman to an executive positions. How can this be? (more…)
On October 12, the Financial Times published the next Women at the Top page as part of its flagship project on female business leadership. (more…)
Kristin Forbes talks about life at the top
Kristin Forbes has experience at the top of two professions: academia and policy. She is a tenured professor at MIT’s Sloan School of Management and used to serve as a member of the White House’s Council of Economic Advisers, where she was the youngest person to ever hold that position. The mother of three has also recently been honoured as a “Young Global Leader” as part of the World Economic Forum at Davos. (more…)
Hewlett Packard’s Meg Whitman joins the one dollar club
Meg Whitman, who was appointed chief executive of Hewlett-Packard on 22 September 2011, last week announced that she would be drawing a salary of only $1. Her severance package, meanwhile, is just $1.50. Contrast this with outgoing boss Leo Apotheker’s severance package, which is estimated at $13.5m. This is a man who has presided over a fall of 46 per cent – worth about $40bn – in his company’s share value during his 11-month tenure. (more…)
Saudi women get the vote – in 2015
Apart from the kingdom of Brunei where no one has the vote, Saudi Arabia is the only country in the world where women are banned from the polling booth. (more…)
Denmark’s first woman prime minister
Social democrat Helle Thorning-Schmidt has become Denmark’s first woman prime minister, bringing the total number of female world leaders to 21.
The appointment of the leader of the left-of-centre party ends ten years of centre-right political leadership in the country.
The school for Africa’s first ladies
Bess Truman once famously quipped that her job as first lady entailed little more than sitting “quietly on the podium next to her husband” and making sure “her hat was on straight”.
Times are different, of course, and while the position of first lady comes with no pay and no official responsibilities in most countries, a new fellowship programme developed by the Rand Corporation, the non-for-profit research organisation, is trying to change that. The programme, which is held at Rand’s office in Arlington, Virginia, aims to help African first ladies and their staff develop analysis skills that will enable them to exert a bigger role in health and social policy across the continent. (more…)
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