CEO

Institutional context

Northrop Grumman Corporation is one of the five largest US defence contractors, formed by the 1994 merger of Northrop and Grumman, with subsequent consolidation. It is the prime contractor for the B-2 and B-21 stealth bombers and major intercontinental ballistic missile programmes. From the corporation's 1994 founding through January 2019 every CEO was male.

Career path

Kathy J. Warden (born 1971) earned a BS in business administration from James Madison University and an MBA from George Washington University. She held senior positions at General Dynamics and at General Electric before joining Northrop Grumman as Vice President and General Manager in 2008. She served as Corporate Vice President and President of Northrop Grumman Mission Systems from 2017 and as President and Chief Operating Officer from 2018.

Appointment

Northrop Grumman's board of directors selected her as CEO effective 1 January 2019. She is the first woman CEO of Northrop Grumman.

Tenure

Active. Tenure has covered the integration of the 2018 Orbital ATK acquisition (renamed Northrop Grumman Innovation Systems and subsequently Northrop Grumman Space Systems), the development and initial production of the B-21 Raider, and substantial growth in the Sentinel intercontinental ballistic missile programme.

Cluster context

Warden's 2019 appointment extends the dataset's defence-industry first-woman line, which began with Hewson at Lockheed Martin and Novakovic at General Dynamics — both January 2013. Three of the top five US defence contractors have had first-woman CEO events in a six-year window. The remaining top-five firms (Boeing, Raytheon Technologies / RTX) have not.

Sources

• Wikipedia — Kathy Warden
• Wikipedia — Northrop Grumman