We have long lived in a society where success had been the avenue reserved exclusively for men. But the times are changing, and they are changing for good. Over the course of the 20th century and the twenty years of the current one, many changes have swept away the conventions and discriminatory practices. One of the main impediments that have decreased over time is women’s active participation in the business world and industry. Women entrepreneurs are making decisions and leading charge of some of the biggest companies in the world.
While 2020 was arguably one of the worst years for humanity due to a deadly pandemic, we witnessed history in the making when Kamala Harris won the vice-presidential election on the Biden-Harris ticket in the 2020 US Presidential Elections. It is clear that women are taking the long-overdue centre stage of the world, and it is about time they are doing so.
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There is no limit to what we, as women, can accomplish.
– Michelle Obama, Former First Lady of the United States
Here, we list the top 10 Successful Women Entrepreneurs in the world to celebrate the remarkable feat of a move towards equality in business.
Indra Nooyi
Indra Nooyi is an Indian American business executive and former CEO of PepsiCo. In 2017, she was the eleventh most powerful woman in the world. Nooyi led PepsiCo’s expansion and global strategy into the era of the tech boom for over a decade. In 2019, she joined Amazon’s board of directors and became the first woman to enter the trillion-dollar company’s exclusive business suite.
Sheryl Sandberg
Sheryl Sandberg is the founder of Leanin.org and COO of Facebook. She joined Facebook’s board of directors in 2008. Since her joining, the social media giant has exploded in user numbers, and the company has made huge profits every year. According to Forbes, her total real-time assets are worth $1.6 billion, and she is the 29th most powerful woman in the world.
Susan Wojcicki
Susan Wojcicki is a Polish-American businesswoman and CEO of YouTube. Wojcicki advocated for the $1.65 billion acquisition of YouTube by Google in 2006. As CEO, she has been leading YouTube since 2014. Currently, the company’s net worth is estimated at $90 billion. Before joining Google, she worked with Intel as a management consultant.
Gina Rinehart
Georgina Hope “Gina” Rinehart is an Australian billionaire businesswoman and Chairman of Hancock Prospectus, the legacy business founded by her father. Under her leadership, the company expanded its operations globally and profitably. She brought the company back from the brink of bankruptcy and turned it into a multi-billion dollar enterprise. She reaped the most significant fortunes from the Roy Hill mining project, which launched shipments to Asia in 2015.
Oprah Winfrey
Oprah Winfrey is perhaps the most famous American personality in the world. She started in show business with her talk show The Oprah Winfrey Show, which ran for 25 years. In this course, she raised a net worth of $2 billion through her entrepreneurial skills and personality. She is involved with the OWN cable channel and has signed deals with Apple’s streaming services to generate unique content, including a book club, TV series and documentaries.
Reshma Saujani
Reshma Saujani is an American attorney and politician. She is the patron of the Girls Who Code tech organization. This non-profit organization aims to support and increase the number of women in computer science by providing young women with the computer skills they need to seize the opportunities of the 21st century. She works to create the most extensive portfolio of future female engineers in the world by promoting women’s participation in the computer industry.
Wang Laichun
Wang Laichun is a Chinese billionaire, Chairperson and partner in electronics manufacturer Luxshare Precision Industry, which supplies parts for Apple Inc. In 2019, Wang Laichun was ranked 71st on the list of the wealthiest people in China. Her previous positions include the leadership role for Taiwanese billionaire Terry Gou. In 1999, she resigned and teamed up with her brother Wang Laisheng to acquire Luxshare.
Roshni Nadar Malhotra
Roshni Nadar Malhotra is an Indian businesswoman, President of HCL Technologies and the first woman to run a publicly-traded IT corporation in India. She is the only daughter of HCL Founder Shiv Nadar. In 2019, she was ranked 54th in Forbes magazine’s list of the 100 Most Powerful Women in the world. HCL is ranked on the Forbes Global 2000 list. It is one of the 20 largest publicly-traded companies in India and had a market capitalization of $21.5 billion as of May 2019. In July 2020, the combined annual revenue of the company and its subsidiaries was $10 billion.
Cher Wang
Cher Wang is a Taiwanese businesswoman and philanthropist. She is the President and Co-founder of HTC Corporation and VIA Technologies, an integrated chipset manufacturer. She is deemed one of the most influential and successful entrepreneurs in the field of technology. In 2012 and 2014, she was the most powerful woman in the world.
Falguni Nayar
Falguni Nayar is the founder of Nykaa, one of India’s largest online fashion and lifestyle e-commerce businesses. She is a second-generation billionaire entrepreneur. After 20 years as a venture investor and trader at Kotak Mahindra, she founded Nykaa in 2012. Under her leadership as the CEO of the company, Nykaa is at the forefront of introducing international luxury brands in India and has provided a wide range of products and services to Indian customers.
What can new and budding entrepreneurs learn from these women entrepreneurs?
With the cases of these successful women, it is clear that overcoming challenges and difficulties arising out of gendered discrimination is possible only with hard work and consistency. New businesses and emerging start-ups led by women entrepreneurs must take a page out of the success stories of all the successful business personalities who came before them and follow the path of innovating the business landscape to make space for them.
While technology is leading the current era, other sectors are also integrating technology in their models to ride the high wave. By doing so, the up and coming women entrepreneurs are certainly going to leave an indelible mark in the business ecosystem.
