In Summary
Highlights of key stories
- Boardroom still a strange place for Kenya women
- Profiles of Kenya’s Top 40 Under 40 women
- There is a silent revolution for women in enterprise in Kenya
How the Top 40 Under 40 Women were picked
Every year the top 40 Under 40
list comes with a mixed bag of routine inputs and equal measure of
freshness that only shapes up at the tail end of the production process.
As we have done consistently in the past six years, the Business Daily invited
its readers to nominate women aged under 40 who in their view have
made significant achievements in whatever segments of our society and
economy.
That is then followed by the
convening of a panel of judges who do the hard job of sifting through
the hundreds of entries and picking out the outstanding nominees for
recognition in this annual listing that has become very competitive.
In the past, accolades have come
our way for recognising these beautiful minds whose efforts and work the
media does not ordinarily feature. But we have also had to deal with a
measure of criticism on very critical areas such as the age of the
candidates and some of the things they claim to have done.
Appearing in the Top 40 Under 40
list has become so critical to hundreds of Kenyan women that some appear
to have decided that they would be on it regardless of their
qualifications to do so.
So this late there has been a
great measure of cutting corners, compression of age, canvassing and
misrepresentation of facts to fit the bill.
The BD team has tried the best it
can to keep the faith and stay the course to come up with a list that
truly has women who represent Kenya’s promise in the corporate world,
research, science, the arts, theatre, professionalism and entrepreneurs.
In compiling this list of Women to Watch, the Business Daily
has attempted to go beyond the basic list of fame and influence to
interrogating each candidate’s ingenuity, performance and staying power
in whatever they do.
We have then ascertained each
candidate’s age, and considered data on the size of the business they
do, its scope and complexity (i.e whether it is a
national/multi-national or cross-sectoral operation), and the
competitive landscape in the segment of the economy it operates.
Women running or occupying senior
positions in companies with a multi-national reach scored higher marks
than those in charge of national/local agencies.
In this list are also women
professionals such as lawyers, architects, and partners in accounting
firms, included purely on the basis of the size (value) of the work they
have done.
The Top 40 Under 40 project has
also awarded high marks to women who have excelled in professions that
have been and remain male dominated such as software engineering,
aviation and engineering. This is because the newspaper believes there
should be no gender-based glass ceiling on any career aspiration.
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