HP’s Whitman sets the record for female Fortune 500 CEOs

With Meg Whitman nabbing the CEO job at Hewlett-Packard–and the four women at the bottom of this list (below) new to the top job this year–America now has 15 female Fortune 500 CEOs.

Not a number to be proud of, but hey, it’s a record and it is progress nonetheless.

Here are the women at the helm–including the rank of their companies on the Fortune 500:

11 Meg Whitman, Hewlett-Packard

39 Pat Woertz, Archer Daniels Midland

42 Angela Braly, WellPoint

43 Indra Nooyi, Pepsico

49 Irene Rosenfeld, Kraft Foods

68 Lynn Elsenhans, Sunoco

84 Ellen Kullman, DuPont

119 Carol Meyrowitz, TJX

121 Ursula Burns, Xerox

221 Laura Sen, BJ’s Wholesale Club

226 Andrea Jung, Avon Products

245 Deanna Mulligan, Guardian Life Insurance (not publicly held)

274 Debra Reed, Sempra Energy

312 Denise Morrison, Campbell Soup

417 Beth Mooney, KeyCorp

As we send our 2011 Most Powerful Women list to press (a day late, as we scrambled yesterday to place Whitman in our rankings), the competition grows. Who will be No. 1? We’ll announce that and reveal the new MPW list next Thursday.

For updates on the Fortune Most Powerful Women community, like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter.

See who made the 2025 Fortune Most Powerful Women list. The definitive ranking of the women at the top of the global business world tells us both who wields power today and who is poised to climb even higher tomorrow.