Nancy McKinstry

The first female—and first American—CEO of Wolters Kluwer in the Netherlands, McKinstry has led a digital transformation of the 175-year old Dutch publishing house. Wolters Kluwer’s stock price has doubled since she took charge a decade ago, and the firm has returned half of its cash to shareholders in 2015 in the form of dividends and share buybacks. McKinstry is the only CEO of a Dutch-listed company who has fulfilled the government’s target to have 30% women on company boards by 2016. And over half of the company’s 19,000 employees are women. —Rupali Arora