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The top 50 women in world business 2011
The top 50 was selected by an expert jury, whose choices were based on information on the executives' performance and durability.
THE TOP 12
1. Irene Rosenfeld (Kraft Foods)
2. Güler Sabanci (Sabanci Holding)
3. Indra Nooyi (PepsiCo)
4. Ursula Burns (Xerox)
5. Andrea Jung (Avon Products)
6. Ellen Kullman (DuPont)
7. Dong Mingzhu (Gree Electric Appliances)
8. Angela Ahrendts (Burberry)
9. Yoshiko Shinohara (Temp Holdings)
10. Chanda Kochhar (ICICI Bank)
11. Patricia Woertz (ADM)
12. Gail Kelly
Company: Westpac
Last year's position: 17
Age: 55
Nationality: Australian
Sector: Banks
Location: Australia
Gail Kelly, chief executive of Westpac Group, the Australian bank, may be one of the country's most powerful businesswomen, but she speaks in an engaging, anecdotal style. However, she exudes the confidence of someone absolutely in control of her subject. Her accent still shows traces of her birthplace and first home in South Africa, where she says she had "a wonderful, rich childhood".
After a career in teaching Gail Kelly at the age of 21 took a job as a bank teller at Nedcor. Not many chief executives start behind the counter. "It was a great introduction to the world of banking," she says.
Her career took off and a range of management positions gave her experience of different disciplines. She launched and ran "Peoples Bank [a division of Nedcor], providing access to people who had not had access to financial services before. This was the new South Africa. I was part of the rebuilding, the culture of change", she says, which made it all the harder to uproot her family, with four children under 10, and move to Australia.
She landed a role at the Commonwealth Bank of Australia, first heading up strategic marketing and later customer service. This led to her appointment to the bank's executive committee.
After just four years in the country, she became the chief executive of St George Bank. She helped transform it from its building society past to a future as a fully-fledged bank. Over more than five years she gained experience of the boardroom, and dealt with regulators, shareholders and the media. It also exposed her to financial markets. This had not been part of her previous banking experience and proved vital as "a precursor to Westpac".
Entering the top tier of Westpac was of an altogether "different size and scale", she says. Indeed it was: Westpac Group is one of the top 20 largest commercial banks in the world by market capitalisation. Kelly, when she was appointed, became the first woman to head up an Australian bank.
"[I am] very pro targets, less so quotas," she says, regarding increasing board participation by women. Westpac Group has a target of 40 per cent for women in senior management team posts by 2014. "By putting that target in we've made a lot of progress, moving from about 32 per cent to 37.5 per cent, so we're well on [track]."
For the full list click here.
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2011.
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