[1][2][3] Before becoming president and CEO in January 2012, she first joined IBM as a systems engineer in 1981 and subsequently headed global sales, marketing, and strategy.

[11][12][5][13][14] Her tenure was also met by fierce criticism relating to executive compensation bonuses, layoffs, outsourcing, and presiding over 24 consecutive quarters of revenue decline.

[4] Her parents divorced and her father left when she was fifteen years old, and her mother subsequently took on multiple jobs to support the family while Rometty looked after the household in the evenings.

[19][18][20] She began attending Northwestern University in Illinois in 1975 on a scholarship from General Motors, where she interned between her junior and senior years.

[21][7] Initially working with clients in the insurance industry,[6] she spent her first ten years at IBM in technical positions.

[18] The New York Times writes that she "quickly moved up to a series of management jobs",[25] where she worked with clients in insurance, banking, telecommunications, manufacturing and health care.

[3] She became senior vice president and group executive for sales, marketing and strategy in 2009,[25][21] focusing on the company's "fast-growing analytics unit".

[5] During this time, she pushed the development of IBM's growth-markets unit, which had been created in 2008 to focus on emerging markets such as Brazil and Vietnam.

[5] In 2011, CNN reported that she was "credited with spearheading IBM's growth strategy by getting the company into the cloud computing and analytics businesses.

[21][7] Her role as IBM's first female chief received note in the press,[1] with former CEO Sam Palmisano responding that her selection had "zero to do with progressive social policies".

Later that year, she announced that IBM would partner with SAP on cloud computing and with Twitter on data analytics and, in 2015, she also brokered a partnership with Box.

[31] In January 2018, she announced IBM's first quarter of year-over-year revenue increase since 2012, with particular growth in areas such as data, blockchain, and the cloud.

[38] Rometty serves on the Council on Foreign Relations and is also on the board of trustees of her alma mater Northwestern University,[5][26] where she was commencement speaker for the graduating class of 2015.

[42] Rometty's tenure as IBM CEO has been marked by prestigious rankings, including by Bloomberg, who named her among the 50 Most Influential People in the World in 2012.

[17] By 2016, she had been named among the worst CEOs by publications including the Motley Fool,[49] Forbes,[50] the Wall Street Journal,[51] and 24/7 Wallstreet.

[16] She was criticized by investors[52] for 22 consecutive quarters of revenue decline between 2012 and the summer of 2017,[9][15] and by IBM employees for accepting pay bonuses during times of layoffs[29] and offshoring.