Amy Hunter, wtop.com

WASHINGTON – Only 14 percent of America’s top executives are women, but that landscape is changing.

“It’s starting to lose the, ‘Oh my God, this is different,’ type of attribute that it used to have,” Joann Lublin, a news editor at the Wall Street Journal, tells WTOP.

“Women are proving that they’ve got the right stuff.”

Lublin says almost 75 percent of all Fortune 500 companies have at least one female executive officer. And among Fortune 1,000 companies, 45 are run by women CEOs.

That number is projected to double in the next five years, some say.

One contributing factor is that more women are being promoted to high-level positions, putting them in better places to be considered for the corner office.

Also, SEC rules that took effect several years ago required companies to take a look at the diversity of their boards, which has put the spotlight on the makeup of their management team.

“I think increasingly we’re getting a much more sophisticated, younger outlook on the part of boards, and they’re more willing to be grooming contenders from within the companies as potential CEOs,” Lublin says.

She cites two recent examples as proof: Several months ago at Johnson & Johnson, a man and a woman went head-to-head in a very tight race to replace the outgoing CEO. The man was hired.

But weeks later, the female, who had competed for the position, was hired to head AVON products, becoming the company’s second female CEO.

At Xerox, a woman was hired as the company’s second female CEO.

“The biggest obstacle that women have to overcome is just the fact that their women.”

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