At Davos, Pioneering Women Are Chosen to Lead Again

For four days in January, the seven chairwomen of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, leaders who hail from France, Australia, the United States, India, Italy and Norway, will be the faces of successful women around the world. Below is a look at six of the seven, who will serve along with Isabelle Kocher of Engie.

Named one of the most influential women in Brussels by Politico in 2016, Sharan Burrow, an Australian who was once a schoolteacher, was the first woman to be elected general secretary of the International Trade Union Confederation in 2010 and re-elected in 2014. In 2006, when the confederation was founded, she held the position of president, another first for a woman.

An expert on education, industrial relations and social policy, in 2000 Burrow became the second woman to be elected president of the Australian Council of Trade Unions.

The first woman to be director-general of the European Organization for Nuclear Research is a rock star in the world of science. From 2009 to 2013, Fabiola Gianotti, the globally renowned particle physicist, led one of the two teams of physicists that discovered the Higgs boson, the “God particle” that explains how other particles get their mass.

Gianotti earned her Ph.D. in experimental particle physics from the University of Milan in 1989. She joined the European Organization for Nuclear Research as a research physicist in 1994, climbing the ranks to eventually become its director-general in 2016. In 2011, she was voted one of the top 100 most inspirational women by The Guardian.

When she is not pushing the boundaries of scientific knowledge, Gianotti’s other passion is music: She is a dedicated pianist.

Christine Lagarde has been a trailblazer throughout her career in both her native France and abroad, dotted with many a “first woman to hold the position of” preface.

After earning a law degree in Paris and a master’s in political science, she worked as a lawyer for nearly 25 years at Baker McKenzie in Chicago, becoming the firm’s first chairwoman.

In 2005, she was appointed France’s trade minister, and in 2007 she became minister of finance, the first woman to hold the latter position not only in France but in any of the Group of 8 countries. She became the first woman to lead the International Monetary Fund in 2011.

In 2016, she was one of 17 French female former government ministers who signed an op-ed article published in the weekly Journal du Dimanche decrying sexism and sexual harassment in French politics.

Ginni Rometty has been at the helm of IBM since 2012, when she became the company’s first female chief executive. She joined IBM in 1981 as a systems engineer, after having worked at General Motors. Rometty studied computer science and electrical engineering on a scholarship provided by General Motors at Northwestern University.

Forbes has ranked her 10th on its list of the world’s 100 most powerful women (2017) and 61st among the world’s most powerful people (2016).

At IBM, she has championed diversity initiatives, leading the women in technology council and the women’s leadership council.

A woman of many talents, Chetna Gala Sinha has been working for social change in her native India since 1986.

In 1987, she left Mumbai for Mhaswad, a drought-prone area in western India, where she and her husband, Vijay Sinha, an activist and farmer, worked in agriculture. Witnessing the difficulties that women faced in the region, she chose to focus on teaching them entrepreneurial skills and financial literacy to empower them and offer them more independence.

In 1997, she founded India’s first rural cooperative bank owned by women: the Mann Deshi Mahila Bank, which provides women with access to financial services, business loans and training. In its first two decades, the bank has reached more than 200,000 women in Maharashtra, a state in the western region.

A Yale World Fellow in 2002 and an Ashoka Fellow in 1996, Sinha last year received the Forbes India Leadership Award for an entrepreneur with social impact.

Nicknamed Norway’s Angela Merkel, Erna Solberg was elected in 2013 and again in 2017, becoming the first Conservative prime minister to win a second term since 1985. Solberg leads a right-wing coalition and is the second woman to serve as prime minister of the Scandinavian country. In 2016, she was appointed a leader of the U.N. secretary-general’s Sustainable Development Goals Advocacy Group.

Solberg has led the Conservative Party since 2004 and represented it in Storting (Parliament) since 1989. From 2001 to 2005, as minister of local government and regional development under Prime Minister Kjell Magne Bondevik, she earned the title “Iron Erna” for her tough stance on immigration.

After her re-election, she appointed women to the posts of finance minister and foreign minister. For the first time, the three top posts in Norway’s Cabinet are held by women.