Look who made Fortune's 2025 Most Powerful Women list
+ We're looking forward to how our brains get upgraded after menopause
It’s that time of year, when Fortune editors showcase the 100 Most Powerful Women in the world — basically, the most successful women in corporate business.
In Fortune’s words: “The list is based on company size and health, as well as the executive's career trajectory, influence, innovation, and efforts to make business better. More than 50 women currently lead Fortune 500 companies, yet only 20 made this year's list — a testament to how increasingly competitive the ranking has become.”
We love seeing so many business women over 40 in powerful positions. Because the story is behind a paywall, we thought you’d like a glimpse of the women on the 2025 list:
^^No. 1: Mary Barra, Chair and CEO, General Motors
^^No. 6: Tan Su Shan, CEO and Director, DBS Group
Get this: Shan has compared herself to a “nagging grandmother” — citing an interpersonal style she picked up from her DBS predecessor that emphasizes consistency, clarity, and good communication.
^^No. 7: Thasunda Brown Duckett, President and CEO, TIAA
Get this: One of two Black women CEOs in the Fortune 500, Duckett has been tasked with righting the ship at the retirement services provider, which has faced significant challenges in the past few years as more of its core customers — teachers and other nonprofit workers — opt for alternative retirement investment options.
No. 22: Dana Walden, Cochairman, Disney Entertainment
No. 24: Ruth Porat, President and CIO, Alphabet
^^No. 26: Fran Horowitz, CEO, Abercrombie & Fitch Co.
Get this: Under Horowitz’s leadership, Abercrombie & Fitch Co. has rehabilitated its namesake and Hollister brands in one of the most dramatic retail comebacks ever. Horowitz spent years fixing a once-toxic culture, undoing a command-and-control management while improving quality. But she has built on that previous success to further build out the company, which in 2024 saw revenue rise 16% to an all-time high of just short of $5 billion.
No. 29: Donna Langley, Chairman, NBCUniversal Entertainment and Studios
^^No. 31: Bela Bajaria, Chief Content Officer, Netflix
No. 43: Claudine Adamo, COO, Merchandising, Costco
No. 44: Colette Kress, CFO of Nvidia
^^No. 45: Leena Nair, CEO, Chanel
No. 48: Daniela Amodei, President and Cofounder, Anthropic
Get this: Along with her older brother, Dario Amodei (Anthropic’s CEO) Daniela Amodei was one of a group of seven OpenAI employees who jumped ship together to create Anthropic in 2021. Now Anthropic is valued at $61.5 billion.
No. 50: Meredith Kopit Levien, President and CEO, New York Times Co.
Get this: A vocal advocate for the role of independent journalism in the AI age, Levien has stressed that while AI may change how news is delivered, it can’t replace the human judgment, standards, and reporting that underpin it.
^^No. 55: Fei-Fei Li, Cofounder and CEO, World Labs
Get this: The Stanford University computer scientist is often referred to as the “godmother of AI” for her pioneering work on the computer vision benchmark ImageNet. She is the founding co-director of Stanford’s Human-Centered AI Institute and the cofounder and CEO of World Labs, which is working on AI models that learn the physics and three dimensions of the real world.
No. 51: Anat Ashkenazi, SVP and CFO of Alphabet and Google
No. 56: Amy Hood, EVP and CFO of Microsoft
No. 67: Deirdre O’Brien, Senior Vice President, Retail, Apple
^^No. 70: Melanie Perkins, Cofounder and CEO, Canva
We love using Canva at The Midst and are excited that the design platform launched an AI-powered coding tool. Valued at $32 billion, Canva is the world’s most valuable startup that is both founded and led by a woman. And we love that Perkins is only 38!
^^No. 75: Mellody Hobson, President and Co-CEO, Ariel Investments
Get this: Hobson has worked at Ariel Investments — the first Black-owned mutual fund company in the U.S. — for more than 30 years, and has been a mainstay on the Most Powerful Women list since she became Ariel’s co-head in 2019.
No. 81: Julie Gao, CFO of ByteDance
What do you think about Fortune's 2025 Most Powerful Women list?
Screw over the hill
Women’s brains are upgraded after menopause
Have you seen Courtney Cox’s spoof on her 1985 Tampax ad? Now 59, she says, “Menopause will eat you alive! … Plus, you get the added bonus of drier skin and bald patches.”
Jokes aside, Cox makes a valid point: Menopause can be f-ing hard. But there’s also a bright side, says Dr. Louann Brizendine, MD, in her book, The Upgrade: How the Female Brain Gets Stronger and Better in Midlife and Beyond. Now that I’m several years into my perimenopause experience, I more than welcome the benefits and upsides of entering our second phase of life.
“The Upgrade” is Dr. Brizendine’s new term for menopause — one that’s about the path to becoming your best deep self. “Maybe it’s a bit grandiose, but if not now, when?” The Upgrade delves into doubts and misinformation about aging in order to help women find our own answers and solve conflicts about how emotions, hormones, biology, and the brain work together.
Who is Louann Brizendine?
Dr. Louann Brizendine MD is a neuropsychiatrist who was among the first to explain why women think, communicate, and feel differently than men in her previous bestseller, The Female Brain.
Inspired by her own experiences and of the thousands of women at her clinic — Women’s Mood and Hormone Clinic at UCSF — Brizendine’s identification of the good in menopause is groundbreaking. During menopause, she says, women’s brains are reshaped in a way that creates new power, much-wanted clarity, and a laser-like sense of purpose. It’s up to us to seize the opportunity.
Repositioning is everything
As a medical doctor who’s been there, done that with menopause, Brizendine declares a revolution on terminology sorely in need of reframing. “Perimenopause and menopause are fossil words created by men at pharmaceutical companies. These words arose not because of an interest in helping women reach The Upgrade, which is a whole-person explosion of growth and realization of potential,” she writes.
How Brizendine redefines perimenopause and menopause
“The Transition” aka perimenopause
The developmental phase of a woman’s life in which the brain and body enter unfamiliar territory as the reproductive phase circuits are finishing their job. This is the phase formerly know as perimenopause. The Transition into the Upgrade can make an already wild fight for homeostasis even more dramatic. Not every woman will experience the shift in the same way, but for the 30% who go through a dramatic version of the Transition, the wild push-pull of this neurochemical storm lasts between two and 14 years.
“The Upgrade” aka menopause
The Upgrade is the wisdom phase that emerges after a woman spends decades in the “hormonal war zone.” Emerging into the most powerful identity phase of a woman’s life, this is what was formerly known as menopause or post-menopause.
How exactly do women get better with age?
Brizendine elegantly weaves together research about human chemistry with real-life examples depicting how women’s brains are poised for upgrades post-menopause. “We receive so many messages about our supposed irrelevance in the second half of life that I’ve decided it’s time to punch through,” she writes. “The more you know about neurochemicals, brain circuits, and the neurons throughout the body, the greater your chances of breaking out of old patterns to create a new life.”
Thanks to our friend Shelby Tutty, we just found out The Midst is included as a resource in Perimenopause for Dummies by Dr. Rebecca Levy-Gantt, an obstetrician and gynecologist.
YAY so glad The Midst is included in a nationally recognized publication for midlife women! I'd bring you all cake and champs if I could :) So much to love in this post. The women on the Fortune list are spectacular (I already knew that because some of my clients work for some of them) and wildly inspiring. I fucking LOVE "The Upgrade" as a re-brand for menopause. I'm in the thick of it right now, and I'll try to remind myself that it's an upgrade on the bad days.
Thanks for the mention! I was happy to share the good news about you being featured in the book.
I LOVE the book The Upgrade. Top 3 perimenopause/menopause books I own and recommend. It came out at a time that was slightly before all of the media frenzy so it's often overlooked, but it's a gem of a book. I'm so glad to see this one getting the coverage that it deserves. It personally helped me at one of my lowest points.