Jill Ker Conway, business woman, college professor and the first female chairman of global property group, Lendlease has passed away in the US on June 1 at 83. Dr. Conway chronicled the role of women in American society. She was born at Hillston, as Jill Ker, on the Western Plains of NSW, and was seen as a trailblazer, being appointed as the first woman to serve as the US-based prestigious Smith College president in 1975. Having married a Canadian, John J Conway, she was a graduate student at Harvard and was 39 when she was named president of Smith. That earned her Time magazine’s “woman of the year” title during the first year of her tenure alongside figures such as first lady Betty Ford, housing and urban development secretary Carla Hills and tennis player Billie Jean King. Dr Conway served on the boards of businesses including Merrill Lynch, Nike, Colgate-Palmolive and Lendlease. She was also a former chairman of the American Antiquarian Society. In 2000 she was appointed as chair of Lendlease at a time when the company needed a firm hand. It had David Higgins as the boss and was venturing overseas, but also expanding rapidly in Australia. But in 2003 the group’s new CEO Greg Clarke took Lendlease back to its roots as a single-focused construction group. Dr Ker Conway resigned that year and rejoined the academic world. In 2013, she was named a Companion of the Order of Australia.
