6 Women Who Just Made Major Career Moves, And Why Each One Matters

Every so often, a batch of career announcements lands around the same time, and the shift is palpable. From a Fortune 500 tech giant to a beloved fast food brand to a WNBA team barely two years old, here are six women stepping into rooms that will look different because they’re in them.

Sarah Kennedy Ellis has been named chief marketing officer of Workday, effective October 5th, according to the company’s official announcement. If you’ve ever clocked in through a payroll system, tracked your vacation days, or watched your company run its finances through the cloud, there’s a real chance Workday was quietly behind it. The platform now powers HR, finance, and IT for more than 11,500 organizations, including over 65% of the Fortune 500.

Sarah isn’t new to building big tech brands from the inside. She spent the last stretch of her career leading global marketing for Google Cloud and Google Workspace, helping fuel one of the fastest-growing businesses in enterprise tech, and before that, served as CMO of both Adobe Experience Cloud and Marketo, where she played a key role in Marketo’s acquisition by Adobe back in 2018. Now she’s stepping in at a moment when Workday is trying to define what its brand sounds like in the AI era, which is no small assignment.

It’s also worth naming the bigger pattern here: marketing is one of the rare corporate fields where women actually outnumber men, making up roughly 60% of marketing roles in the U.S. Sarah isn’t an exception to that trend; she’s proof of what it can build when it reaches the top.

The Ad Council announced that Jenny Darling is joining as its new Chief Financial and Operations Officer, stepping in for Ken Kroll after his decade-plus tenure in the role. If you grew up with Smokey Bear or “Friends Don’t Let Friends Drive Drunk,” you grew up watching the Ad Council’s work, even if you never thought about who was keeping the organization’s finances and technology running behind the scenes.

Jenny arrives with more than 20 years of finance and operations experience across media, sports, and entertainment. Most recently, she was CFO of Axios, where she helped steer the company through major growth and its acquisition by Cox Enterprises, and before that, she was CFO of the Pittsburgh Penguins. Her resume also includes senior finance roles at NBCUniversal, Showtime, and CNN, a career built almost entirely inside organizations whose names everyone recognizes, even when hers wasn’t the one in the headlines.

KFC Global has named Amy Ellis Durini as its first-ever Global Chief Brand Officer, a newly created role effective November 1st, per the company’s announcement. She’ll report directly to KFC Global CEO Scott Mezvinsky and take charge of brand strategy, loyalty, retail, and new concept development worldwide.

This isn’t Durini’s first time in the building. She spent eight years across KFC Global and its Latin America and Caribbean business before moving to Taco Bell in 2021, where she rose to Chief Marketing and Strategy Officer for the brand’s international division and helped drive campaigns like Encore Hours and Live Mas Club. Her return lands at a genuinely pivotal moment: KFC is in the middle of a full brand refresh, with a new visual identity, redesigned restaurants, and an expanded menu all rolling out at once. Coming back to a brand she already knows well, at exactly the moment it’s reinventing itself, is a great time for a homecoming.

Golden State has promoted Amanda Chin to Chief Marketing Officer, one of four executive promotions the organization announced together, according to Sportico. Chin has spent over a decade rising through the Golden State organization, and if you’ve followed the WNBA at all over the past two years, you’ve felt her work directly: she led the process that shaped the Golden State Valkyries’ entire identity, the name, the logo, the colors, all of it, built in part through fan input. The result wasn’t a quiet launch. The Valkyries sold out all 22 home games in their inaugural season and drew nearly 400,000 fans total, an all-time WNBA attendance record.

As CMO, Chin now oversees marketing strategy, growth, social media, creative, and game entertainment across both the Warriors and the Valkyries. Women remain seriously underrepresented in leadership across professional sports, which makes watching someone build a brand this successful and then get handed even more to run exactly the kind of moment worth pointing to.

The Guitar Center Music Foundation has named Valeisha Butterfield its new CEO and Executive Director, effective immediately. GCMF board president Curtis Heath said Butterfield brings “the rare combination of nonprofit leadership, music industry experience and operational expertise” the foundation needs for its next stage of growth.

Butterfield’s journey has been extremely diverse. She started in politics, working in public affairs at the Department of Commerce during the Obama administration and later serving as national youth vote director for Obama’s 2012 campaign, before moving into music and tech. She became the Recording Academy’s first-ever chief diversity and inclusion officer in 2020, was later named co-president of the organization, and has twice held partnership roles at Google. She’s also the founder of SEED Media, through which she produced a film adaptation of Minda Harts’ “The Memo,” and currently sits on GRAMMY Global Ventures’ board and the GRAMMYs’ Television Committee. Not many people arrive at a music nonprofit having already worked inside the White House, Google, and the Recording Academy, but Valeisha does!

Not every entry on this list is a new beginning. Kaity Tong closed out her broadcasting career at the end of August, delivering her final PIX11 newscast after 50 years in the industry, including 34 years anchoring in New York, split between ABC’s Eyewitness News and PIX11, according to the station. She’s a member of the New York State Broadcasters Hall of Fame, an Emmy winner, and one of the first prominent Asian American anchors on a major U.S. network, a path she says she found somewhat by accident, having originally set out to become a college professor before a summer newsroom job changed the trajectory of her life entirely.

Careers like Sarah’s, Jenny’s, Amy’s, Amanda’s, and Valeisha’s are only possible because of the decades of women like Kaity who did the work of proving what was possible long before it was easy. When women rise, we all rise, and that’s true whether someone’s just stepping into a new title or stepping away from a desk they’ve earned the right to leave.