Qantas CFO named company’s first ever woman CEO

Dive Brief:

CFO Vanessa Hudson was promoted from her current role as finance chief for Australian airline company Qantas to CEO, the company announced Tuesday.
Hudson, who will be the company’s first ever woman chief executive, succeeds Alan Joyce who will be retiring later this year in November.
The soon to be top executive has been with the Sydney, Australia-based company for almost three decades and had held a variety of leadership roles during her tenure, including chief customer officer and senior vice president for Qantas across the Americas and New Zealand, according to the release.

Dive Insight:

Hudson began her career at Qantas as an internal audit supervisor in 1994, before making her way up to CFO in 2019, having served a plethora of leadership roles prior to taking the financial helm.

The newly minted top executive takes her seat at a time when more and more women are stepping into senior executive roles.

The percentage of female CFOs in the U.S. hit an all-time high of 16% in 2022, up from 6.3% in 2004, and the number of women CFOs has nearly doubled over the last 10 years, according to data from CristKolder.

Hudson joins fellow finance chief Christine Dorfler in making history within the C-suite. Dorfler recently took on the role as the National Football League’s first ever woman CFO.

However, Dorfler and Hudson are still an anomaly when it comes to women being promoted to senior level positions. For every 100 men in the U.S. who are promoted from entry-level roles to manager positions, only 87 women are promoted, and only 82 women of color are promoted, according to McKinsey & Company’s 2022 Women in the Workplace report.

The appointment of Hudson to CEO was the culmination of a “rigorous selection process and allows for a smooth transition from current CEO Alan Joyce,” said chairman Richard Goyder in the company statement.

Joyce has served as CEO for a little under 15 years, since 2008, and will remain with the company until his retirement in November to ensure a smooth transition. An announcement regarding a new CFO will be made in the coming months, according to the release.

“For the past five years Vanessa has had a direct hand in shaping our strategy as a member of the Group Management Committee, and her handling of the finance and treasury portfolio during the COVID crisis was outstanding,” said Goyder.