The Most Powerful Women You've Never Heard Of

Liu Yandong (State councilor, China):

As Mao Zedong famously said - they hold up "half the sky" but, women make up just over 20 percent of the delegates in China's national legislature. Former chemist Liu Yandong is the outlier: the only woman in the Politburo, the 25-member influential decision-making body at the top of the Communist Party pyramid. She is considered a close ally of President Hu Jintao, and hence, has a good chance of ascending this fall to become one of the small handful in the Politburo Standing Committee, the true ruling council at the center of the system. Liu's politics differ from those of her contemporaries, though some analysts think she favors increasing China's contacts with the outside world. Liu, 66, has an honorary Ph.D. from the State University of New York at Stony Brook and spoke at Yale University in 2009. Liu would be the first woman in Chinese history to make it to the Standing Committee.