Insider Monkey presents The 13 Most Influential Women to Watch in 2021. This list was compiled by respectable Forbes journalists, including Moira Forbes, and the women are ranked by economic impact and visibility. To get the list of the most influential women to watch in 2021, Insider Monkey consulted Forbes and Business Insider and added up points from both lists to identify the 13 women with the highest combined scores.
Jacinda Ardern is the first influential woman in this article. She is the 40th Prime Minister of New Zealand and was born in 1980. Ruth Porat was born in England in 1958 but relocated with her family to Massachusetts. She became the chief financial officer of Alphabet, which is the parent company of Google. As of 2020, she joined Blackstone, the Wall Street investment company. American business executive Julie Sweet was born in California in 1966. She is involved in the World Economic Forum’s International Business Council, Business Roundtable, and Catalyst’s board of directors. Television producer, TV show host Oprah Winfrey was born in Mississippi in 1954. Her most famous show is The Oprah Winfrey Show that ran for 25 years and was converted into a business and media empire. Sheryl Sandberg was born in Washington D.C. in 1969. She has been the chief operating officer of Facebook Inc. since 2008 and managed to turn its $56 million loss to $18.5 billion in profits in 2019 by focusing on small business advertising. Mary Barra was born in Michigan in 1961 to a Finnish-American family. She studied electrical engineering at Kettering University. Since 2014, she has been the CEO of GM and was the first female leader of one of the three largest automakers in the United States. The former Wall Street analyst Wojcicki established the DNA testing company 23andMe with Paul Cusenza and Linda Avey in 2006. The value of 23andMe is around $2.5 billion, and it’s the only company that is involved in direct-to-consumer genetics testing. She was born in Brussels in 1958 to German parents. After earning her doctorate, she taught at the Hanover Medical School. She served in Angela Merkel’s cabinet between 2005 and 2019, which is actually the longest tenure ever. For the details of the women that top this list, their average points, countries, categories, and education, read The 13 Most Influential Women to Watch in 2021.
