The Nightly On Leadership: The talented women behind Australia’s resilient retail industry

There’s a reason Katie Page wears the crown as Australia’s Retail Queen.

As chief executive of Harvey Norman, arguably the nation’s biggest furniture, electronics and white goods retailer, Page holds the reins to an $8 billion empire that boasts more than 300 stores across Australia and seven other countries.

And while more women have recently taken the top jobs in Australian retailing, Page’s 27-year tenure as the boss of Harvey Norman is unmatched in the industry.

“(Page is) probably as good a retailer as anyone in the world,” says Gerry Harvey, chair of Harvey Norman and Page’s husband of 38 years. “It would be generally accepted there’s no one better.”

Harvey is quick to rattle off Page’s impressive list of credentials.

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In addition to being Harvey Norman CEO, Page made history in 2005 by becoming the first female board member of the National Rugby League.

She also has a long history of supporting and advocating for Australian women’s sports, is an outspoken advocate for gender equality, and co-owns Queensland thoroughbred racehorse auction house Magic Millions with her husband.

“If you look at her record, it tells you she’s very good. She’s had all these other jobs as well like Magic Millions, she’s done a lot of our family work and she’s done government department (work) and she’s done Tourism Australia and on and on and on,” Harvey says. “She’s been involved with the top people in retail and politics and business now for a very long time.

“Her knowledge is great but also her contacts. She knows pretty much anyone that you need to know.”

For the billionaire businessman, there is no shadow of a doubt that Page has paved the way for other women to lead some of the nation’s biggest retailers.

“She’s constantly getting women ringing her that are in business and saying, ‘Would you be interested in mentoring me?’” Harvey says. “Of course because she’s had all that publicity and being in that position for such a long time, other women look at her and think, ‘If she can do it, maybe I can do it’.”

Registering change

In the combined 200-plus-year history of Australia’s two biggest supermarkets, Coles and Woolworths, neither had been led by a woman.

That changed in February 2023 when Coles appointed Leah Weckert as its new chief executive, taking over from Steven Cain, who retired after five years at the top.

Before her appointment as CEO, Weckert was the boss of the company’s Coles Express business.

After being headhunted by management consultancy McKinsey in 2011, Weckert’s first role at the supermarket giant was in merchandising. From there, she moved to the private-label division where she was responsible for sourcing and quality.

Weckert, who trained as a chemical engineer and has a masters from Harvard Business School, then spent a year running the 204 Coles supermarkets across Victoria.

Her first executive leadership role was director of people and culture in 2017. A year later, and just before Coles demerged from Wesfarmers to become a separate listed company, Weckert was appointed chief financial officer. A mother of two, she started her tenure by requesting meetings begin at 9am to allow her to do the school run.

“Intelligent”, “analytical”, “passionate” and “resilient” are just some of the words Cain uses to describe Weckert, who he worked closely with during Coles’ post-demerger transformation.

“(Weckert is) extremely passionate about Coles, she loves the business,” Cain says.

“The fact that she’d had a multifunctional background and experience meant that she could get things done at pace across the organisation, which is not a skill that everybody has.

“All that being done while she was a working mum, too.”

Cain adds Weckert is “incredibly well-regarded across the business”.

“Leah is one of those leaders who actually listens actively, and not only to the people in her pay group or the people she reports to but across all the stakeholder groups,” he says. “When you look at leadership through the ages and the various styles that are out there, some leaders don’t hear.”

Weckert’s appointment to the top job begged the question as to why it had taken so long when there was no better industry to have a woman at the helm than that of supermarkets, whose customers are largely female.

“When you go back to that initial observation that there seems to be more women in retail than some other industries, it’s really the way it should be,” Cain says.

“When you look at the numbers, most shoppers are still women . . . most of the people who work in these stores are women.

“If you look historically, there were real barriers for women to be elevated to the executive leadership team and the CEO roles. Things have changed a lot over time . . . but it’s now more what you’d expect a normal funnel to be like where if the vast majority of customers and the vast majority of employees are women, then you’d expect a fair share of CEOs over time to be women.

“That hasn’t happened, but I think in the future it’s going to be the norm.”

A year after Weckert was appointed to steer Coles, its bigger rival Woolworths named its first female chief executive in Amanda Bardwell, who took over from long-serving boss Brad Banducci.

Bardwell has been with Woolworths since 2001, working for many years in its liquor division, which has now been spun out into separately listed company Endeavour.

The Queenslander’s career at the supermarket giant involved leadership roles at the Dan Murphy’s and Cellarmasters online divisions, before moving to become the director of Woolworths’ digital food offering.

In 2017, Bardwell became managing director of the fast-growing e-commerce division WooliesX, which has become one of Woolworths’ major earners.

Retailing has been in Bardwell’s DNA from a young age. She grew up in Samford, near Brisbane, and first started working in a local supermarket,as a teenager where,she staffed the check-out and stocked shelves.

The prevalence of female CEOs says more about where the strongest talent and most relevant experience sits today

In 2024, Woolworths chair Scott Perkins described Bardwell — a graduate of the Queensland University of Technology and with a masters from the University of New South Wales — as a proven leader, business builder and modern retailer.

“Under her leadership, WooliesX has gone from infancy in 2015 to a $7 billion market-leading business,” he said at the time.

Coles and Woolworths are currently facing separate legal actions in the Federal Court for allegedly misleading consumers through “illusory” discounts on hundreds of common grocery products between February 2022 and May 2023 for Coles and between September 2021 and May 2023 for Woolworths.

Neither Weckert nor Bardwell were in charge of the supermarkets at the time but all eyes will be on how they respond to the outcome.

Joining the ranks of Weckert and Bardwell at the helm of major supermarkets is Anna McGrath, who landed the top job at Aldi Australia in August 2023.

“It’s super interesting . . . (that) the three biggest supermarkets in Australia are now run by women,” retail expert Trent Rigby says. “The dominant category in Australian retail is completely female.”

Career take-off

Rigby, director at Retail Customer Advisory, also points out several of these female CEOs have come from a completely different background, like customer loyalty programs.

Among them is Olivia Wirth, who became Myer executive chair in June 2024 after turning Qantas’ popular loyalty program into a profit engine for the national carrier.

Wirth, who was with the airline for 14 years until her departure in early 2024, oversaw Qantas Loyalty’s expansion into hotels, holidays, insurance and financial services, and a membership base that grew to about 16 million.

She’s now attempting to build the department store chain’s Myer One loyalty program into a powerhouse scheme that mirrors the success of Qantas Loyalty, by refreshing its brand offerings to draw in more customers.

At the time of Wirth’s appointment, then Myer boss John King said he was: “deeply impressed with (Olivia’s) hands-on approach, commitment to our loyal customers and support for the team”.

Billionaire retailer and Myer’s biggest shareholder Solomon Lew says Wirth brings “sharp strategic perspective, deep customer insight, and the confidence to make bold decisions”, qualities Lew says define strong leadership in modern retail.

“Her track record shows a deep understanding of both brand and loyalty at scale, and make her an outstanding leader amongst the Australian retail landscape,” Lew says.

Also making the jump from aviation to retail is former Virgin Australia boss Jayne Hrdlicka, who officially stepped into the managing director role at Dan Murphy’s and BWS owner Endeavour at the start of the year.

Hrdlicka spent nearly four years rebuilding Virgin from a COVID-19 collapse in November 2020 to a profitable business under white knight owner US private equity Bain Capital.

She has also held roles as chief executive of Jetstar and infant formula distributor A2 Milk, and spent six years as a director with Woolworths until 2016 — which at the time included Endeavour’s brands and hotels before they were spun out of the grocery giant as a separately listed company in mid-2021.

Chief Executive Women boss Lisa Annese says it’s great to see women leading some of Australia’s biggest retailers, which include Aleksandra Spaseska at Kmart Group, Jo Horgan at beauty behemoth Mecca and Ikea Australia’s Mirja Viinanen.

“What stands out is that many of these women came up through the business,” Annese says. “Amanda Bardwell joined Woolworths in 2001, Leah Weckert joined Coles in 2011, Aleksandra Spaseska joined Wesfarmers in 2008. That kind of pipeline investment is what produces women CEOs.”

Emma Stephenson, a research associate at the University of Western Australia, says large-scale reviews have proven companies with female CEOs or more women on boards and in top management teams tend to perform better on outcomes such as corporate social responsibility, firm transparency and, in some cases, financial performance.

Annese adds leaders build policies that reflect their experience.

“Women who have navigated caring responsibilities alongside their careers tend to build more flexible, inclusive workplaces. That benefits everyone and improves productivity,” she says.

According to CEW, one of Australia’s most powerful female lobby groups, just 14 per cent of ASX100 CEO roles were held by women in 2025. This is slightly down from 15 per cent in 2024. In the consumer staples sector — which includes the two major supermarkets — the figure is more promising, with 27 per cent of CEO roles now held by women compared with just 9 per cent in 2024.

“Women make the majority of household purchasing decisions,” Annese says. “Retailers that understand their customer base have recognised that having women in leadership helps them make better decisions about their market.”

Rigby agrees but cautions against framing the prevalence of female retail CEOs as inherent sexism.

“Retail is one of the few industries where the CEO role is very closely tied to the customer, the culture inside the business and day-to-day execution,” he says.

“I think the prevalence of female CEOs says more about where the strongest talent and most relevant experience sits today, rather than any assumption that women should run retail because women do more of the shopping.”

Page previously told The Nightly On that having a feel for retail comes from being a dedicated shopper. Her husband concurs.

“(Page is) a very good shopper and she does it with speed. I’ve seen her go into a shop and she’ll go, ‘I’ll take that, that and that’, and 10 minutes later she’s walked out the door when other people took half an hour,” Harvey says. “She makes up her mind very quickly.”

But Annese says there are still gaps, calling out a fashion jewellery chain that “sells almost exclusively to women and employs a largely female workforce but has no women in its executive leadership team”.

“This is unacceptable,” she says. “When you have a majority female workforce and no women in leadership, there is a real problem. According to our recent CEW senior executive census, companies with gender targets are 2.7 times more likely to achieve gender balance.

“What retail demonstrates is that when companies commit to this as a business priority, results follow.”