María Dolores Dancausa, the only woman on Forbes’ top CEOs in 2017

Bankinter’s chief executive officer, María Dolores Dancausa, has been selected by the magazine, Forbes, as the sixth top executive on its ranking of the 50 top CEOs at publicly traded companies in Spain. She is the only female CEO on this list, published yesterday.

Once again, María Dolores Dancausa holds a distinguished position on Forbes ranking of top CEOs, having been included on it in 2014. Since then, she has maintained a respectable presence on the ranking: she was the top banking CEO in 2015 and also repeated as the best woman CEO in the magazine's 2016 ranking.

At the top of the 2017 list of top CEOs are Florentino Pérez (ACS), Josu Jon Imaz (Repsol) and Luis Maroto (Amadeus), followed by José Antonio Álvarez (Santander) and Pablo Isla (Inditex).

Forbes prepared this ranking based on the conclusions it drew from a study conducted together with some of the major investment banks, fund managers, consultancy firms, head-hunters and business schools in Spain.

Although the magazine highlights the presence of one female CEO on the entire ranking (the chief executive officer of Bankinter), it does point out that the general lack of female CEOs is evident in other countries and that ‘in France, Germany and the United Kingdom, men occupy 99%, 98% and 94% of top leadership positions, respectively,’ in the companies listed on their selective stock market indices. Forbes also calls attention to a study carried out in 2017 by the consultancy firm, Grant Thornton, which indicates that Spain (with 27%) and France (with 31%) are the countries with the highest proportion of female CEOs in the European Union.