Fortune Most Powerful Women International Summit opens in Riyadh
- In today’s CEO Daily: Diane Brady on the Fortune MPW International Summit in Riyadh.
- The big story: JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon warns markets are showing "an extraordinary amount of complacency.”
- The markets: Treading water.
- Analyst notes from Oxford Economics, Pantheon and Convera.
- Plus: All the news and watercooler chat from Fortune.
Good morning from Riyadh, where we will be hosting the Fortune Most Powerful Women International Summit today and tomorrow. Here is the agenda and a link to follow the conversation.
The advancement of women has been a key part of Saudi Arabia’s Vision 2030 plan since it launched nine years ago. In that time, women’s labor force participation rate has doubled as the kingdom has expanded job opportunities, banned sexual discrimination, expanded paid maternity leave and made it possible for women to drive, travel more freely, and take on bigger leadership roles.
Hala al-Tuwaijri, who heads the Saudi Human Rights Commission and will speak with me today, points to more than 50 reforms in women’s rights since 2016. Saudi Arabia has gone from being ranked 141st out of 146 countries in the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Index to 126th last year. There’s progress and more to do, making this a great place to convene women leading transformational change in Saudi Arabia and beyond.
This morning, we also published the 2025 edition of the Fortune Most Powerful Women in business list. MPW editor Emma Hinchliffe notes in the opening essay that we changed the scoring system for the list, which first published in 1998, to reflect an executive’s influence, innovation, career trajectory and impact, along with key business metrics that are the foundation of this list. Tune in to our livestream to see Fortune Editor-in-Chief Alyson Shontell interview Julie Sweet, who’s chair and CEO of Accenture and #2 on this year’s list. Emma, Ellie Austin, Michal Lev-Ram will also interview newsmakers there.
I’m excited to kick off with Lubna Olayan, who joined her father’s company in Saudi Arabia in 1984, and built Olayan Financing Company into a powerhouse that put her on our MPW list 12 times. In June 2016, just weeks after Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman launched Vision 2030, Olayan came to our MPW summit in London and predicted that women’s right to drive would be coming very soon. She was right. Now chairing Saudi Awwal Bank and investing in the next generation of business, I can’t wait to learn what she sees coming next.
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Contact CEO Daily via Diane Brady at diane.brady@fortune.com
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com