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Katharine Graham took over The Washington Post after her husband's death. She became the first woman to lead a Fortune 500 company. Under her leadership, the Post published the Pentagon Papers and broke Watergate. Revenue grew from $84 million to $1.4 billion.
A second woman followed in 1976. By 1986, there were three. The climb was agonizingly slow.
In the 2025 Fortune 500, which ranks American companies by revenue, 55 of the 500 chief executives are women, which is 11 percent, and the wall at the top of this page prints all 500 names in rank order with those 55 in red, starting with Walmart's John Furner at number one.
The highest-ranked woman is Gail Boudreaux of Elevance Health at number 15, followed by Mary Barra at General Motors at 19, Sarah London at Centene at 21, Priscilla Almodovar at Fannie Mae at 25 and Maryann Mannen at Marathon Petroleum at 28, so five of the thirty biggest companies in America are run by women.
The count did not rise in a straight line, because it went from one in 1972 to four in 1997, fell back to two the following year, and then took until 2014 to reach 24, before dropping again to 21 in 2016 and jumping to 32 a year later.
Since 2017 it has risen in almost every year, to 41 in 2021, 52 in 2023 and 55 in 2025, and the women on the list now run companies as different as Oracle under Safra Catz at number 71, AMD under Lisa Su at 135, Hershey under Michele Buck at 372 and JetBlue under Joanna Geraghty at 432.
The names and ranks come from the 2025 Fortune 500, which orders American companies by total revenue for the year, and the year-by-year count of women chief executives comes from Fortune and from Catalyst, the research group that tracks women in business leadership, so any change of chief executive since the list was compiled will not show here yet.
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