Citizenship: The 100 Most Powerful Women in the world...

... according to magazine Forbes.

North-American magazine Forbes published the 2006 list of the world's 100 most powerful women. In 2005, Angela Merkel, then leader of the opposition Christian-democrat party in Germany, did not even appear in the classification. This year she leads the table. Rice, American secretary of State since January of 2005, after having advised president George W. Bush on the national security since his arrival to the White House in January 2001, was relegated to the second place of the classification, which she led since 2004. The Chinese vice-Prime Minister, Yi Wu, who is nicknamed "the Iron Lady of China", and who is said to be intelligent, firm and elegant, also loses a place, to become third. The seven following women of the top 10 are business executives. Indra Nooyi, the appointed CEO of PepsiCo, a North American of Indian origin, is fourth in the Forbes' list, followed by Anne Mulcahy, of Xerox. Among the newcomers in this years' list, there are Michelle Bachelet, the socialist President of Chile (17th), the President of Liberia, Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf (51st) and the Prime Minister of South-Korea, Han Myung-Sook (68th).

In the same site, to the online survey to the question “When will a woman be elected president of the United States?”, surprisingly enough, the "2008" answer is ahead with 25% of the votes. Guess who would be able to make that possible…However, in second place with 24 % comes the answer "not in the next 30 to 40 years…".

Meanwhile, and according to another article in Forbes, quoting the Center for Women's Business Research, “the number of firms run by women grew at nearly twice the rate of all U.S. firms from 1997 to 2004. But a new study released this month by VentureOne, a unit of Dow Jones, shows that the number of women-owned or women-run businesses backed by venture capitalists has been on a slippery decline since 2002”. “To be clear, the number of venture-capital-backed, female-owned firms wasn't very big to begin with. In 2002, only 7.55% of all venture-backed companies had women as chief executives. But in the first half of 2006, that number fell to 3.7% (the lowest percentage since 1997). The number of venture-backed companies with women in top management bottomed out at 29.7%--versus 34.8% in 2002.” (…)
check: http://www.forbes.com/home/entrepreneurs/2006/08/30/venturecapital-kleinerperkins-women-cx_mc_0831women.html

Methodology: “The annual listing of the 100 most powerful women in the world is based on a ranking that is the composite of visibility (measured by press citations) and economic impact. The later reflects three things: résumé (a prime minister is more powerful than a senator); the size of the economic sphere over which a leader holds sway; and a multiplier that aims to make different financial yardsticks comparable”.