A woman's work: it's almost never done as the CEO of a major company. And there's more to that than just men behaving badly.

• Author: Martin, Edward
• Position: Cover Story

Eleven years after R.J. Reynolds died in 1918, they completed the building that bears his name. It stands 22 stories in downtown Winston-Salem, a monument to the dark-eyed, bearded man who set out to make plug chewing tobacco and wound up creating what's now Reynolds American Inc., the nation's second-largest tobacco company.

On a gray morning, four executives cluster around a speakerphone in an upstairs office. Stock analysts are on the line. The company, created by the merger of No. 3 Brown & Williamson Tobacco and No. 2 R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Holdings, had net sales of $6.4 billion in 2004, but its market share slipped to about 31%. How, New York-based Smith Barney's Bonnie Herzog asks, are you going to halt the slide?

"I'll take a shot at that," volunteers Susan Ivey, who unfolds a plan to remake the 130-year-old company and its mix of brands. Tense times lie ahead. Soaring taxes, lawsuits and regulatory terrors stalk cigarette makers. "We anticipate a 6-to-8% volume decline as we recalibrate the portfolio," she tells the analyst. "Our goal is to make sure the lines cross as soon as we can."

A trim woman with auburn hair and angular features, Ivey has scaled the ranks. At 47, she has a reputation as an innovative, freewheeling--free-spirited, some say--globetrotting executive. She got into this business, she once quipped, because she wanted to sell something she was passionate about: booze, makeup, cigarettes. Formerly head of Louisville, Ky.-based B & W, a subsidiary of giant British American Tobacco PLC, she became president and CEO of Reynolds American after the merger in October 2003 and now stands squarely in the shadow of Richard Joshua Reynolds. But as a woman, it's lonely there.

Ivey is one of a handful to reach the pinnacle in North Carolina. Among the state's 14 Fortune 500 companies, she's alone. Only three of the top 75 public companies based here have female CEOs. The North Carolina 100, Grant Thornton's yearly ranking of the largest private companies, lists but two. Some experts say corporations will soon spout a new generation of CEOs rife with Susan Iveys, women recruited into management-training pipelines laid decades ago. As Sam Cooke sang in the '60s, "A change is gonna come." But the reality, right now, is vintage James Brown: "It's a man's world."

Why so few so far? "Women who came 10 years before me literally had to fight their way to the top," Pamela Lewis, 47, recalls. Now, says the president of Queens University--once a women's college--in Charlotte and former dean of its McColl Graduate School of Business, "there's very little overt gender discrimination left." True, few have achieved the fame of her business school's namesake--retired Bank of America Chairman Hugh McColl: "You rarely see iconic women leaders because, among other things, we haven't been in top leadership positions that long."

The enemy, more times than not, is inertia. "It's the old boys' club at work," says Lissa Broome, banking-law professor at UNC Chapel Hill and director of its Center for Banking and Finance. "People in power feel comfortable around people who look and act like themselves." She cites a 2003 study that found nearly 90% of directors of North Carolina's 50 largest public companies are men. Ivey, for example, is one of two women on her 13-member board. But five of Reynolds' top seven executives are women. "The old school--the ones who created these glass ceilings--is retiring," she says. "You now have a generation that grew up in a more diverse management structure."

Nature and nurture, as well as timing and tradition, play their part. "For ingrained social and biological reasons, women have a stronger sense of responsibility for staying at home with their children," says Crandall Bowles, 58, a Charlotte resident who is chairman and CEO of 15,000-employee Springs Industries Inc., based in nearby Fort Mill, S.C. "That'll be a difference for a long time to come, until men feel like taking that level of responsibility."

Ivey didn't have children. Her stepsons were nearly grown when she married their father in 1997. She's usually up before dawn, working out at 5 and at work by about 7. Her normal day...