Nearly a Quarter of EEI Member Utilities
Steve Mitnick is president of Lines Up, Inc., editor-in-chief of Public Utilities Fortnightly, and author of Lewis Latimer, The First Hidden Figure.
There's Bethany Owen of ALLETE. There's Patti Poppe of CMS Energy. Actually, Poppe was just appointed CEO of PG&E Corp. and will be moving from Jackson, Michigan to San Francisco, California. There's Lynn Good of Duke Energy. Among the thirteen women who are CEOs of Edison Electric Institute member utilities, she leads the largest of their utilities.
There's Kelly Tomblin of El Paso Electric. And Mari McClure of Green Mountain Power. And Connie Lau of Hawaiian Electric Industries, who has served in the CEO position longer than the other women who are their utilities' top execs. There's Lisa Grow of Idacorp and Linda Apsey of ITC Holdings. There's Pat Collawn of PNM Resources and Maria Pope of Portland General Electric. Mary Kipp is CEO of a neighbor, Puget Sound Energy. And finally, there's Stacey Doré of Sharyland Utilities and Nancy Tower of Tampa Electric.
It adds up to thirteen. That's the number, as we said, of CEOs of EEI member utilities who are women. Since there are fifty-six companies altogether, women account for twenty-three percent of these top positions of utility leadership; nearly a quarter of the total.
This is a fairly impressive percentage relative to other industries. To see this, take a look at the Fortune 500. In May of this year, it was reported that seven percent of Fortune 500 companies had women in their most senior position. So, our industry compares very well. Still, we imagine the percentages of women CEOs in both investor-owned electric utilities and companies overall will increase significantly in the years to come.
Lead image, top row: Connie Lau, Maria Pope, Patti Poppe. Bottom row: Lisa Grow, Bethany Owen, Linda Apsey.
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