About Lady Globes

Lady Globes

Lady Globes is a Hebrew-language monthly magazine devoted to women, published by Globes, Israel's financial newspaper, from the Globes publishing house in Rishon LeZion in the Central District. It is issued as a monthly magazine insert of Globes and is also sold separately on newsstands, a dual distribution that places it both inside Israel's main business newspaper and in front of general magazine buyers. Within the Globes group, Lady Globes has a specific and important job: it covers the Israeli economy through the women who lead, build and finance it, and it publishes the annual list of the 50 most influential women in Israel, one of the most cited rankings in Israeli business media. Globes itself describes Lady Globes as its monthly magazine published about women in Israel's economy.

The Globes home: a financial newspaper builds a women's magazine

To understand Lady Globes it is necessary to understand Globes. Globes is a Hebrew-language daily evening financial newspaper, founded on 17 October 1983 by publisher Haim Bar-On, on the basis of a small Haifa-based financial newspaper, in partnership with businessman Eliezer Fishman. The paper is printed on salmon-coloured paper inspired by the British Financial Times, deals with economic issues and news from the Israeli and international business worlds, and is regarded as Israel's oldest financial newspaper. It began in 1983, by its own account, as a two-page information sheet offering up-to-date analysis of the growing Tel Aviv Stock Exchange, and grew into a daily of more than eighty pages delivered to subscribers' homes in the evening after the stock market closes. In 2011 Eliezer Fishman held 57.10 percent of the newspaper's stock and Haim Bar-On 42.90 percent. In June 2017 control of the Monitin-Globes group passed to Alona Bar-On, the founder's daughter, and Anat Agmon in equal partnership, after a court process involving the Fishman holding. The chief editor of Globes in recent listings is Naama Sikuler, appointed in 2017.

Globes built a family of supplements and inserts around the daily paper. They include G, the main weekend supplement; Nadlan, the weekly real-estate insert published on Sundays; and monthly magazine inserts including Lady Globes and, until its closure in 2016, Firma, which covered advertising, communications and marketing. Lady Globes is the title in that family addressed to and about women — not as a lifestyle extra detached from the newspaper's purpose, but as a business magazine in its own right, applying Globes' economic reporting to the careers, companies and capital of Israeli women.

Format, frequency and distribution

Lady Globes appears monthly in Hebrew. As an insert, it reaches Globes subscribers with the newspaper; as a separately sold magazine, it reaches newsstand buyers who may not take the daily paper. That arrangement is common for Israeli newspaper magazine inserts and it shapes the magazine's content. It must satisfy a business newspaper's existing readership — managers, investors, bankers and officials across the finance world, in Globes' own description of its audience — while also standing alone on a newsstand next to general women's and lifestyle magazines. The result is a hybrid unique in Israeli publishing: a women's magazine whose home is a financial daily, whose measures of achievement are boardrooms, funds, laboratories and companies, and whose interviews ask business questions first.

Home in Rishon LeZion and digital presence

The magazine's physical and institutional home is the Globes publishing house in Rishon LeZion, south of Tel Aviv, where the group — which employs, by its company listings, some hundreds of staff across the newspaper, website and conferences — produces the daily paper, its supplements and its digital editions. Globes was a digital pioneer among Israeli newspapers: it was the first economic newspaper in Israel to open an online website, in 1995 by its own history, with an online version running since 1997 in other accounts, publishing in Hebrew and English. Lady Globes content, including its influential-women reporting, also appears through the Globes English-language site, which is how much of its best-known reporting reaches international readers.

The 50 most influential women

The magazine's signature product is its annual list of the 50 most influential women in Israel. The list is compiled annually and, in the words of an eBay announcement marking one honouree, is comprised of scientists, investors, chief executives and other businesswomen who, through impressive work and achievement, influenced the Israeli and global business, scientific and social arenas. Lady Globes is described in that announcement as one of the leading financial magazines in Israel, and its Woman of the Year sits at the top of the distinguished list.

The best documented example is Dr Kira Radinsky, the data scientist and co-founder of SalesPredict, a predictive marketing company acquired by eBay in 2016, who became eBay Israel's chief scientist and director of data science. Lady Globes selected Radinsky as its Woman of the Year, at the head of its 50 most influential women list. In her interview with the magazine she spoke about dreaming of becoming a scientist from childhood, admiring Galileo and Leonardo da Vinci, and taking a risky doctoral subject — a methodical way to predict events — without knowing whether she could publish the required articles. The profile captures the magazine's method: a ranking is the headline, but the substance is a reported portrait of how a woman built authority in a technical or commercial field.

The list's reach extends beyond business pages. Recipients of the Peres Center Medal of Distinction in 2021 included women whose Lady Globes recognition was cited in their biographies: entrepreneur Julia Zaher, owner and chief executive of the Al-Arz tahini factory and the first Arab woman to run a factory, was named one of the 50 most influential women in 2019 by Lady Globes; Professor Levenberg was likewise noted as named among the 50 influential women in 2019. Those citations show how a Lady Globes ranking travels — into award biographies, company announcements and international coverage — as a recognised marker of standing for Israeli women across sectors, including Arab and Druze entrepreneurs whose businesses operate far from Tel Aviv's financial centre.

Reporting on women in finance, funds and start-ups

Beyond the annual list, Lady Globes reports on the changing place of women in Israeli economic life, and Globes' English site carries that reporting to a wider audience under the Lady Globes name. One investigation set out to discover how Israel came to have so many women at the helm of its financial institutions: at the time of the report the Governor of the Bank of Israel, Dr Karnit Flug, her deputy, Dr Nadine Baudot-Trajtenberg, and the Supervisor of Banks, Dr Hedva Ber, were all women; three of the chief executives of Israel's big five banks were women — Rakefet Russak-Aminoach at Bank Leumi, Lilach Asher-Topilsky at Israel Discount Bank and Smadar Barber-Tsadik at First International Bank; the controlling shareholder of a fourth bank was Shari Arison; and senior regulatory posts, from Accountant-General to the head of the Antitrust Authority and the Supervisor of the Capital Market, Insurance and Savings, were held by women. Lady Globes treated that concentration not as a curiosity but as a system to be explained, asking how the unique financial female ecosystem, as it put it, came about.

A second recurring subject is women in venture capital and technology. Lady Globes assembled senior women fund managers to discuss obstacles, dilemmas, successes and failures as more women became partners and founders in Israeli funds, noting figures such as Anat Naschitz, a managing partner at the OrbiMed Israel fund focusing on drugs, medical equipment and digital medicine, who had founded a fund with partners after a career at McKinsey and Apax Partners. In another project, Lady Globes gathered twenty Israeli women entrepreneurs selected for a Silicon Valley programme, women who had raised millions of dollars for companies in fields from homeland security applications to mobile data management, cardiac diagnostics and global personnel placement, and asked them about mistakes, managerial advice and effective habits. Together these reports document a structural change — women moving from the margins of Israeli finance and technology into fund management and founding roles — with the magazine acting as both chronicler and convenor of that community.

Editorial character

Lady Globes' editorial character follows from its parentage. A general women's magazine might lead with fashion, relationships or celebrity. Lady Globes leads with power and work: who runs the banks, who manages the funds, who founded the company, who leads the laboratory, and what it cost and what it took. Its interviews dwell on decisions, failures and management practice. Its ranking weighs influence, not fame. At the same time, because it is sold separately and read as a magazine, it writes about those subjects as human stories — childhood ambitions, risky choices, families and turning points appear in its profiles alongside funding rounds and titles. That combination, financial rigour with magazine storytelling, is what distinguishes it from both the daily Globes news pages and from Israel's general women's magazines such as LaIsha, with which Ma'ariv LaNoar was once paired as one of the country's two most popular magazines by circulation in the 1980s.

Place in Israeli magazine publishing

Israeli financial journalism is concentrated in three groups — Globes; TheMarker of the Haaretz Group, whose monthly magazine publishes competing influence and wealth lists; and Calcalist of the Yedioth Ahronoth Group. Within that competition, Lady Globes gives Globes something none of its direct rivals replicates in the same form: a monthly women's business magazine with its own established ranking. TheMarker Magazine's 100 most influential people covers the whole economy; Lady Globes' 50 most influential women creates a parallel, focused record in which women are not a minority of a general list but the entire subject. For historians of Israeli business, those annual lists amount to a running archive of women's advancement into senior economic roles, year by year, name by name.

The magazine also reflects a wider truth about Israeli media economics. A monthly insert can survive inside a newspaper group in a way an independent monthly often cannot, sharing reporting, printing, distribution and advertising sales with the daily paper while keeping a distinct editorial identity. Lady Globes has outlived its sibling monthly Firma, closed in 2016, and remains part of the current Globes supplements structure in reference listings of the newspaper. Its publishing house's location in Rishon LeZion, its monthly rhythm, its newsstand presence and its digital life on the Globes sites together make it both a print magazine and a standing section of Israel's business conversation.

Significance and legacy

Lady Globes matters because it institutionalised the coverage of women as economic actors in Israel's main financial newspaper. Before such a title, women appeared in business coverage as exceptions; Lady Globes made them a beat, a community and an annual measured ranking. Its Woman of the Year and 50 most influential women lists have recognised scientists such as Kira Radinsky, bankers, regulators, fund managers and industrialists, and its reporting has examined, with data and interviews, why Israel's financial sector developed an unusual concentration of women at the top and how that pattern is spreading into venture capital and technology. Published monthly in Hebrew from Rishon LeZion as an insert of Globes and sold separately on newsstands, Lady Globes stands in the WorldNM directory as Israel's dedicated women's business magazine — a title whose subject is women, whose method is financial journalism, and whose annual list has become one of the reference points for women's influence in the Israeli economy.