The Most Powerful Women You’ve Never Heard Of
1 Helen Clark
Administrator, U.N. Development Program | New Zealand
As New
Zealand’s prime minister, Helen Clark oversaw a decade of economic growth and
won three straight terms in her post after a long career as a Labour Party
legislator and cabinet minister. Less than a year following her departure as
Kiwi prime minister, however, Clark turned to a much larger — and more
challenging — stage: Since 2009, she has led the U.N. Development Program (UNDP), the arm of the United Nations
charged with confronting the world’s worst problems, from global poverty to
corrupt governance to health and environmental crises. Clark, 62, now oversees
the UNDP’s nearly $5 billion
annual budget and more than 8,000 employees operating in 177 countries. Cholera
in Haiti and famine in Somalia may be far from daily life for many New
Zealanders, but Clark appears undaunted. Her top goal as administrator, she
said last fall, is no less than to eradicate extreme poverty around the world.
2 Liu Yandong
State councilor | China
Although they hold up “half the sky,” as Mao Zedong
famously said, women make up just over 20 percent of the delegates in China’s
national legislature. Former chemist Liu Yandong is the outlier: the only woman
in the Politburo, the 25-member elite decision-making body at the top of the
Communist Party pyramid. Considered a close ally of President Hu Jintao, she
has a good chance of ascending this fall to become one of the small handful in
Category: Politics
