Ginni Rometty

Virginia Marie "Ginni" Rometty (born July 29, 1957) is an American business executive who was executive chairman of IBM after stepping down as CEO on April 1, 2020. She was previously chairman, president and CEO of IBM, becoming the first woman to head the company. She retired from IBM on December 31, 2020, after a near-40 year career there. Before becoming president and CEO in January 2012, she first joined IBM as a systems engineer in 1981 and subsequently headed global sales, marketing, and strategy. While general manager of IBM's global services division, in 2002 she helped negotiate IBM's purchase of PricewaterhouseCoopers' IT consulting business, becoming known for her work integrating the two companies. As CEO, she focused IBM on analytics, cloud computing, and cognitive computing systems. Rometty's tenure as IBM's CEO was marked by awards including by Bloomberg's 50 Most Influential People in the World, Fortune "50 Most Powerful Women in Business", Times 20 Most Important People in Tech and Forbes America's Top 50 Women In Tech. Her tenure was also met by fierce criticism relating to executive compensation bonuses, layoffs, outsourcing, and presiding over 24 consecutive quarters of revenue decline. Early life and education Ginni Rometty was born on July 29, 1957, in Chicago, Illinois, as Virginia Marie Nicosia. Growing up outside Chicago, she was the eldest of four children in an Italian-American family. Her parents divorced and her father left when she was fifteen years old, and her mother subsequently took on multiple jobs to support the family while Rometty looked after the household in the evenings. She began attending Northwestern University in Illinois in 1975 on a scholarship from General Motors, where she interned between her junior and senior years. Rometty was also a member of the Kappa Kappa Gamma sorority, eventually becoming its president. She graduated with high honors from the Robert R. McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science at Northwestern University in 1979, receiving a bachelor's degree in computer science and electrical engineering. She has received honorary doctoral degrees from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (2014) and Northwestern University (2015). She also received an honorary degree from North Carolina State University.