Lubna Olayan

Lubna Olayan was born in 1955 into a prominent Saudi business family, the daughter of Suliman Olayan, who had built a wide-ranging trading and industrial conglomerate. She studied in Beirut and then earned an MBA at Indiana University in the United States before returning to Saudi Arabia to join the family business in 1983, at a time when it was unusual for a Saudi woman to hold any formal corporate role at all, let alone in a large industrial company.

She began in relatively junior finance positions and spent years proving herself in a business culture where senior roles were assumed to belong to men, gradually taking on more responsibility across the group's operations in food, manufacturing and financial services. In 2004 she became chief executive of Olayan Financing Company, one of the largest privately held businesses in the Gulf, a position that made her one of the most senior women in Middle Eastern corporate life.

Her public visibility brought pressure as well as recognition. A 2004 speech she gave calling for greater roles for Saudi women in the workforce drew criticism from conservative quarters, and she navigated years of social change in the kingdom, including the lifting of the driving ban and slow shifts in workplace rules, from a prominent and sometimes uncomfortable position at the front of that change.

She has also served on international boards, including those of major Western banks, and has been widely credited with helping to normalise the idea of women in senior Gulf business roles well before it became more common.