CEO Sisters

Only a handful of women run America’s top companies. We’ll talk with two of them, who also happen to be sisters. We'll bring them face-to-face with Occupy Wall Street.

Three women take the Nobel Peace Prize this week. Fifty-seven percent of all college students are female. In medicine and law, they’re crowding through the doors. But at the tip top of American business, women are still just a sliver of the power pie.

In the Fortune 500 biggest American corporations there are just 14 female CEOs. Today we talk with two top female CEOs. Big power. Big money. They happen to be sisters. We’ll ask them about life as a woman at the top – and about the Occupy Wall Street litany of grievance with corporate America.

This hour On Point: CEO sisters.
-Tom Ashbrook

Denise Morrison, CEO of Campbell Soup, where she has worked since 2003.

Maggie Wilderotter, CEO of Frontier Communications since 2006, with 14,800 employees and $3.8 revenue in 2010.

Julie Fry, public defender with the Legal Aid Society in Brooklyn. She has been active in the Occupy Wall Street Protests

The Wall Street Journal "Thirteen months apart, the sisters are the eldest of four daughters, all of whom became executives. Their father, an AT&T Inc. executive, talked to the girls about setting profit-margin goals while they were still in grade school. Their mother taught them that ambition is a part of femininity."

Los Angeles Times "The financial industry, long known for its boys-club environment, has only a small fraction of women as top executives. And that small cadre has been thinning out in recent years, with the most recent example Krawcheck's departure as BofA's president of global wealth management."

The Christian Science Monitor "But anyone who thinks that is just wrong. Numbers released just this May by the National Association of Colleges and Employers show that women who are graduating from college this year will make 17 percent less than their male counterparts in their first jobs. And that's before those pesky questions of family and career balance are even on the table."