Women are rising in every aspect and breaking all stereotypes, especially in the business and corporate world. This century has seen more women at the top positions of corporations than in the entire history.
One thing that is common between every woman who has ever been in the top position in a man's world is that "they were extraordinary."
While there are still a few barriers left to be crushed, women have worked hard over the last5 6 decades to bring their knowledge and expertise into the boardroom. Following are the women who were the first female board member of huge corporations.
Joan Ganz Cooney was one of the greatest businesswomen in corporate history. She was the co-founder of CTV (Children's Television Workshop) in the year 1968 and served as the CEO till 1990. She is currently the head of the Executive Committee of their board.
In the year 1978, she joined Johnson & Johnson which is a pharmaceutical and consumer packaged goods manufacturer as a member of the board.
She was also on the board of directors of many corporations like Chase Manhattan Bank, Metropolitan Life Insurance, Edison Schools, and Xerox. Joan is currently the director at the Peter G. Peterson Foundation and she is also a trustee of many NGOs.
No one needs to tell you about Hillary Clinton but not most people know that she was the first woman as a boardroom member at Walmart in 1986.
Being on the board, she encourages gender impartiality and nature matters. She worked for almost 6 years as a board member and in those 6 years, Wal-Mart had developed an environmental advisory group.
Catherine Cleary was the first woman to serve both AT&T and General Motors as a board member in the year 1972. While her tenure at General Motors, she encourages many female talent.
Catherine was trying to make employers realize that there was a supply of very capable employees in their company who just happened to be women.
Before she brought the revolution to GM, she was also the first-ever female board member at Northwestern Mutual Life Insurance in the year 1955 and she was also an administrator at the University of Wisconsin. She died in the year 2010 at the age of 93.
Well, Giannini Hoffman was the first woman who served as a board member of Sears but in the year 1982, Sybil Collins Mobley became the first African-American to be on the board of directors.
Anheuser Busch Co., Hershey Foods Corp., and Premark International are some companies in which she served as a boardroom member. Sybil also worked as a dean of the School of Business and Industry at Florida A&M University.
In 2014, Honda Motors appointed Hideko Kunii as the first female board member. Being a tech expert she worked at Japanese electronics maker Ricoh. She is well known to promote gender equality in Japan's intensely patriarchal working system and she is also a professor in Tokyo.
In the year 1976, Ford Motors appointed a skillful print media executive as the first female board of directors and her name is Marian Heiskell. Her name came up because of various conservationist and philanthropic activities.
She was an honorable citizen of Gateway National Recreation Area and also the head of the National Parks of New York Harbor Conservancy.
Everyone knows Terry Savage is an influential speaker on personal finance and international markets.
But very few know that she began her career as a stockbroker after getting a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship in American Studies at the University of Michigan and later she became the first female trader on the Chicago Board Options Exchange.
Later in the year 1990, she joined McDonald's as a board of directors where she worked for over 14 years. She also served the Chicago Mercantile Exchange Group and Pennzoil-Quaker State Corporation as board members.
One of the most influential women in the last century is Jill Ruckelshaus. She has achieved many things in her lifetime and one of her achievements is being the first female board member of Costco in the year 1996.
She worked as an environmental Consultant, Director at UNICEF and also earned Peabody Awards for Radio and Television. She is still actively working in the National Women'sPolitical Caucus and various Women's Forums.
Women are now not the inferior gender, they have proved over and over again that they have the capabilities to run any size of business. Well, more women are dominating the business and corporate world and there is more to come.