Since 2017, Jessica Uhl has been serving as the Chief Financial Officer of international energy company Royal Dutch Shell, becoming the second woman to be appointed to that position. Her senior-level positions and career achievements made her appear on Forbes’ and Fortune’s 2020 lists of powerful women.
Born in 1968, she was raised in California and attended the University of California, Berkeley, where she earned a Bachelor of Arts in Political Economy in 1989, before obtaining her MBA from INSEAD in Fontainebleau, France, in 1997.
She started her career at Citibank in San Francisco during the 1990s as a financial analyst, also working in commercial and real estate finance to help finance small to medium-sized companies.
From 1997 to 2003, she worked for Enron in Houston and Panama as part of their MBA associate program. Uhl joined Shell in 2004 in the finance and business development division, working within the renewables business.
Over the last 17 years, she has been based in Europe and the U.S. and worked across the company in downstream, upstream and corporate roles, eventually taking over the role of CFO in 2017.
Throughout her career, she has also built a reputation of advocating for both tax and climate transparency among energy giants and now focuses on expanding Shell’s climate commitments. For instance, the company recently announced its commitment to achieve net-zero emissions by 2050, becoming the largest oil and gas company with such a target.
Earlier this year, in July, she was appointed as a Member of the board of directors of Goldman Sachs Group Inc, hence becoming the fifth woman director on that board and its only member to come from the fossil fuel industry. This is in the framework of Goldman’s aggressive and specific goals of increasing diversity with, among others, the presence of female professionals at all job levels.
Uhl’s career path, carefully navigated through the male-dominated oil and gas industry, is proof that she’s a top-tier business leader and a trailblazer for executive women.