This Is the Largest Company With a Female CEO

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By Douglas A. McIntyre Published
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This Is the Largest Company With a Female CEO

© Drive-Thru Pharmacy (CC BY 2.0) by Steve Snodgrass

According to Fortune, 41 women run Fortune 500 companies. Decades ago, the number was zero.

Some of the companies run by women have well-known names. These include General Motors, run by Mary Barra; Citigroup, run by Jane Fraser; and Best Buy, run by Corie Barry. However, the largest company run by a woman may not be as well known by the public.

CVS Health is run by Karen Lynch. The company ranks fourth on the Fortune 500 list. It has a market capitalization of $107 billion, and its sales last year were $269 billion. She took over as CEO in February of this year.

Lynch made $2.5 million last year, according to the company’s proxy. However, she had not become the chief executive yet. Presumably, her pay will rise this year. Last year, chief Larry Merio made $4.7 million.
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When Lynch was promoted to the CEO role, the company’s board wrote:

Karen has more than three decades of experience in the health care industry. Prior to becoming CEO, she was Executive Vice President, CVS Health and President of Aetna, responsible for driving the strategy to deliver consumer-focused, high-value health care to the millions of people Aetna serves. For the last five years, Karen has been named among Fortune’s Most Powerful Women in Business, and in 2020, she was recognized on Forbes’ list of The World’s 100 Most Powerful Women.

CVS faces a number of challenges. One is the issue of what it pays workers. It recently increased the sum for entry-level workers to $15 an hour. Another challenge is high expectations for earnings. For its most recent quarter, the company topped both revenue and earnings estimates. It also raised its guidance.

Lynch is off to a fast start, which means she is also among the most successful CEOs of a huge American company. It appears that will be true for some time.

Click here to see who America’s highest-paid CEOs are.
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Photo of Douglas A. McIntyre
About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.

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