Sharon Yeshaya

Company: Morgan StanleyTitle: Chief Financial OfficerIndustry: Financials and InsuranceNotable in 2024: Yeshaya guided Morgan Stanley through its leadership transition, leveraging vast institutional knowledge to provide continuity and stability to the firm as new CEO Ted Pick took the helm.

Over the past decade, the percentage of women chief financial officers in the Fortune 500 has doubled to nearly 20%. That's almost twice as many women in top financial positions as in chief executive positions (at roughly 11%), and Sharon Yeshaya, Morgan Stanley CFO, is among the most prominent examples.

Yeshaya became CFO in June 2021 as part of a management reorg at the Wall Street bank aligned with the planned succession from CEO James Gorman, to whom she had served as chief of staff, to current CEO Ted Pick.

Throughout her career at Morgan Stanley, which Yeshaya first joined as a summer intern in 2000 just as the dot-com bubble burst, she has held many roles, including head of investor relations before the CFO post, analyst in its mergers & acquisitions department, and fixed income positions in New York and Hong Kong (Gorman elevated her to his chief lieutenant from the fixed income division).

When Gorman first approached Yeshaya about stepping into the role of CFO, she was caught off guard. "I did not expect that to be the conversation we were having," she told Bloomberg in an interview after her 2021 promotion to CFO.

Today, the Wharton graduate leads a team of thousands managing the financial resources of a firm that holds over a trillion dollars on its balance sheet and manages trillions more for clients. "Every stage of my career has informed my current role," she told Barron's in an interview.

Morgan Stanley's financial and stock performance has been strong in recent years, continuing through the most recent quarterly results.

Yeshaya knows that more than just financial responsibility comes with being a prominent woman CFO in a male-dominated industry. "The first, most obvious, thing is: There's somebody out there who actually looks at you and thinks to themselves, 'I've got a shot.' And I think that all of us have looked at somebody that way, saying, 'Well, maybe it is possible that if I work really hard, someone will notice me, and then I will be able to move forward,"' she told Bloomberg.