Fortune Just Ranked Your Power Role Models

According to Fortune, GM CEO Mary Barra is the most powerful woman in business. The magazine just released its 2015 Most Powerful Women List, an annual ranking of the top 50 women business leaders in the world, and Barra took the number one spot for leading her company “out from under the shadow of its 2014 ignition-switch recall.”

The 2015 list contains an impressive 27 CEOs who control one trillion dollars in stock market value. Talk about real power.

Rounding out the top five are PepsiCo’s Indra Nooyi, IBM’s Ginni Rometty, Lockheed Martin’s Marillyn Hewson, and DuPont’s Ellen Kullman. Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg came in at No. 8, Yahoo’s Marissa Mayer at No. 18, and YouTube’s Susan Wojcicki at No. 19.

Fortune has a good summary of newcomers to the list here (welcome, first-timers Cathy Engelbert of Deloitte and Lynne Doughtie of KPMG!).

However, we highly recommend reading through the whole list. It’ll take you less than 15 minutes, and it keeps the focus squarely on these women’s incredible professional accomplishments with nary a mention of work-life balance. It’s as if Fortune takes it as a given that career success and personal fulfillment for women aren’t mutually exclusive—and that’s pretty refreshing.

About the Author

Julianne Helinek is Take The Lead's blog editor and writer of the newsletter Take The Lead This Week. She thinks the women she knows are too talented not to be running the world, and she’s especially interested in bringing more men into the gender equality conversation. Julianne is an MBA student at NYU’s Stern School of Business. For more on feminism in the business school world, follow her on Twitter at @thefeministmba.