Since 2019, Ellen Kullman has been serving as President and Chief Executive Officer of Carbon, Inc., a 3D printing company best known for its manufacturing partnerships with Adidas, Ikea, and Ford.
This position is even more remarkable as it is a rare example of a former female Chief Executive becoming a CEO for a second time.
From 2009 to 2015, she was chairman and CEO of Dupont, a Fortune 500 chemical company, serving as its 19th executive and the first woman to lead the company since its founding in 1802.
Holder of a mechanical engineering degree from Tufts University and a master’s degree in management from Kellogg School of Management of Northwestern University, she first worked for Westinghouse and General Electric before joining DuPont in 1988 as a marketing manager for the company’s medical imaging business. Prior to being appointed chief executive officer, she served as president, executive vice president and a member of the company’s office of the chief executive.
While Kullman has led some of the world’s largest public companies, she has never stopped advocating and setting the tone for diversity and inclusion, and by among others, emphasizing the appointment of women to leadership positions.
“I hear a lot of people say we have a meritocracy,” she once explained. “But at the end of the day, if everybody in your organization looks white [and] male, it’s probably not a meritocracy. The interesting thing is creativity and innovation is not just in one section of the population. Women are graduating from college at the same rate as men, we’re entering the workforce at the same rate as men, but with every successive rung up that ladder, less and less women are there.”
In line with the forementioned, she also co-chairs “Paradigm for Parity”, a coalition for business leaders aiming to address the corporate leadership gender gap. A rising number of companies, including major corporations like Walmart, AstraZeneca, Coca-Cola, and United Technologies, have signed up for a five-point action plan to achieve full gender parity in leadership by 2030.
As such, given her remarkable career path, there is no surprise she appeared on Forbes’ list of powerful and influential women.