Ann is the daughter of a Newcastle shoemaker, became one of the first women to be qualified to work on offshore oil and gas rigs and, after a successful career in banking, she now works at the finance company MasterCard where she manages a staff of 4000.

Mary Curnock Cook, Chief Executive of UCAS.

Dame Professor Carol Black is the country’s leading expert adviser on health and work. The principal of Newnham College Cambridge, she was a consultant rheumatologist and a former President of the Royal College of Physicians. However, she started out in medicine as working class grammar school girl with a third class degree in history...

Dido Harding has been the CEO of TalkTalk Group for just over three years, having previously worked for top retailers like Sainsburys and Tesco. She’s keen to make sure that her workforce is as diverse as possible and wants to see more women running companies not necessarily on their boards. The former amateur jockey and mother of two tells us what it’s like to juggle family life with life as a chief exec.

Professor Sue Bailey talks about her work as a child and adolescent forensic psychiatrist.

Dame Julie Moore is Chief Executive of University Hospitals Birmingham NHS Foundation Trust. She spent ten years in clinical practice before moving into nursing management. She became a director of Leeds Teaching Hospitals Trust in 1998. In 2002 she moved to Birmingham, taking up her current post in 2006. She received a DBE for services to healthcare in 2011. She joins Jenni to talk about her career, the night Malala Yousafzai was admitted to the Queen Elizabeth Hospital and being partnered with trusts in special measures.

Assistant Commissioner Cressida Dick serves as the most senior female officer within the Metropolitan Police, a rank equivalent to that of Chief Constable outside London. During the Olympic and Paralympic games, she was national director for counter terrorism, an extension of her role leading on the long-term threat of terrorism across the UK. A trained hostage negotiator, she has extensive experience in public order, firearms and security. In 2005, she was the officer in charge of the operation which led to the fatal shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes. A jury cleared her of blame at the end of the prosecution of the Metropolitan Police under health and safety laws. Three years ago she was awarded the Queen’s Police Medal.

Clare Gerada is a GP and Chair of the Council of the Royal College of General Practitioners, a position she holds until November. A vocal defender of the NHS, she sprang to prominence as a leading voice in the opposition to the coalition government’s reorganisation of the NHS in England. Early this year she was named as one of Woman’s Hour’s 100 most powerful women in the UK. She talks to Jane Garvey about the role, her medical career and what power means to her.

Philanthropist Dame Vivien Duffield inherited a vast fortune in 1979 after the death of her father Sir Charles Clore, the retail tycoon who owned Selfridges, and became Chair of the Clore Foundation. In 2000 she merged this with her own organisation to produce the Clore Duffield Foundation. She is thought to have given over £200 million to charity projects.

Since becoming an MP, Yvette Cooper has been tipped for high office, becoming the first female Chief Secretary to the Treasury in Tony Blair’s government. She was also the first minister to take maternity leave and with husband Ed Balls, was part of the first married couple to sit in Cabinet. Jane Garvey joined the Shadow Home Secretary and Woman’s Hour Powerlister in her West Yorkshire constituency to talk about ambition, the two Eds, and her battle with civil servants whom she felt excluded her while she was a Minister on maternity leave.