FORTUNE's Most Powerful Women in Business
FORTUNE's annual ranking of America's leading businesswomen
Claire Watts
Rank: 43
(2004 Rank: 45)

Age: 45
Company: Wal-Mart
Based in: Bentonville
Title: EVP, Product Development, Apparel and Home Merchandising
Get quote: WMT
Claire Watts
An eight-page ad insert for Wal-Mart apparel in September's Vogue? That was the retail giant telegraphing its new strategy to attract more fashionable, affluent customers — and Watts is the one charged with bringing them in. She heads the $40 billion-plus clothing and furnishings merchandising unit and oversees product development. Her first big move: last month's launch of a trendy in-house fashion label, Metro 7. Under Watts, Wal-Mart added a New York-based trend-spotting office and hired more than 300 fashion merchandisers to track sales at the store level.
From the November 14, 2005 issue
Highest pay
These women are among the highest paid in corporate America. All of them are employed by companies with over $1 billion in sales that filed proxies by September 1, 2005.
1 Meg Whitman $29.9 million
2 Andrea Jung $22.1 million
3 (tie) Suzanne Johnson $17.5 million
3 (tie) Zoe Cruz $17.5 million
Young and powerful
Newcomer Charlene Begley heads up GE's plastics division and is the youngest of this group at age 39. She bumped last year's youngest gun, Citigroup CFO Sallie Krawcheck, now 40. But, on average, the Power 50 are in their late 40s.
1 Charlene Begley 39
2 Sallie Krawcheck 40
3 Susan Decker 42
Perennial powers
These women have been on the Power 50 each year since it began in 1998.
1 Oprah Winfrey Harpo
2 Andrea Jung Avon
3 Pat Russo Lucent

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Most stock quote data provided by BATS. Market indices are shown in real time, except for the DJIA, which is delayed by two minutes. All times are ET. Disclaimer. Morningstar: © 2018 Morningstar, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Factset: FactSet Research Systems Inc. 2018. All rights reserved. Chicago Mercantile Association: Certain market data is the property of Chicago Mercantile Exchange Inc. and its licensors. All rights reserved. Dow Jones: The Dow Jones branded indices are proprietary to and are calculated, distributed and marketed by DJI Opco, a subsidiary of S&P Dow Jones Indices LLC and have been licensed for use to S&P Opco, LLC and CNN. Standard & Poor's and S&P are registered trademarks of Standard & Poor's Financial Services LLC and Dow Jones is a registered trademark of Dow Jones Trademark Holdings LLC. All content of the Dow Jones branded indices © S&P Dow Jones Indices LLC 2018 and/or its affiliates.