[16] Ramon A. Gutierrez. He is very light-skinned based on his photograph alone I would not have spotted him as an African-American (nor would I have done so by his name, Ren). With over 25 years of experience in technology, media, entertainment, and learning, Gilli has led executive positions in Fortune 500 companies as well as startups, optimizing planning, execution, delivery, and , Every CEO and leader at every organizational level faces shared challenges, including: In this uniquely severe global crisis, CEOs and leaders need to adopt new management and leadership models. From her early years at Cathedral High School, Burns excelled in math. Alongside those three, Stephanie L. Ferris is the CEO of Fidelity National Information Services. [17] Rodolfo de la Garza, Louis De Sipio, F. Chris Garcia, John Garcia, and Angelo Falcon. In 1978, just before the Iranian Revolution, the family fled, first to France, and then to the USA. Women still couldnt rise to editorial and writing positions and had to sue a second time. [30], As part of the research for the 2011 edition of The New CEOs, we looked up the leadership teams of a sample of companies on the Fortune list, companies selected from throughout the Fortune 500, because we knew from previous research that the larger companies were more likely to have promoted diversity within their ranks than the smaller companies. In April 2020 she took a leave of absence for undisclosed health reasons. However, in todays always-available work culture, most companies prefer part-time working arrangements. I am the first person to acknowledge that I am human, for better and worse. And yet Although they hold almost 52 percent of all professional-level jobs, American women lag substantially behind men when it comes to their representation in leadership positions: They are. The most striking feature of the line in Figure 3 for African-Americans is how flat it is. . ", In the 1960s, Ruth Hill Useem, a sociologist at Michigan State, used the term "third culture kids" to refer to the children of diplomats, missionaries, men in the military, and others who spent some time in their own home culture but, because of the nature of their parents' work, were raised in other cultures. BY Christiaan Hetzner. Similarly, in a 2018 archival study of 4,951 CEOs across five decades that builds on glass cliff theory, Gundemir, Carton and Homan found that East Asian-American CEOs were much more likely than white male CEOs to be appointed during periods of decline. Today's edition was curated by Kinsey Crowley. Both women, who are now leading two of the largest pharmacy store chains in the country, have played a critical role in helping to effectively roll out the Covid-19 vaccine. Ajay Banga has been the CEO at Mastercard since 2010. Beth Ford serves as president and CEO of Land O'Lakes, Inc., a Fortune 500 company, a Fortune 200 food production and agribusiness company, and a 100-year-old farmer-owned cooperative. Arnold and Marian wanted their daughter to have someone to play with, and they liked Jide and saw how bright he was, so they suggested to Jide's biological mother that Jide live with them and attend the same school as their daughter. "[20] Perhaps academics like me, various journalists, and others simply have missed that Ren Jones is African-American because he is so light-skinned. They suggested that their failure to find statistical significance was a result of their having included CEOs who had recently been appointed, and who therefore at the time of their research had very short tenures. The American Class Structure in an Age of Growing Inequality, 9th Edition. Figure 1: White male CEOs and "New CEOs" in the Fortune 500, 2000-2020, Table 1: New "New CEOs" (new appointments), by year, 2000-2020, Figure 3: Women, African-American, Asian-American, and Latinx CEOs, 2000-2020, Figure 4: Women CEOs, Women in the U.S. Senate, and Women in the U.S. House of Representatives, 2000-2020, Figure 5: Black CEOs, Black members of the U.S. Senate, and Black members of the U.S. House of Representatives, 2000-2020, Table 2: Potential "New CEOs" in the Pipeline, 2011 and 2020, A 2019 interview with Bill Domhoff on the origins of his interest in Power Structure Research, VIDEO: "The Triumph of the Corporate Rich", Power Elite Database: Read about it, search it, download it. However, a new and unexpected pattern has emerged for the other underrepresented groups. Although I was unable to ascertain the class background for many of the Latinx CEOs (some don't say, others were complicated by families who had to leave, or chose to leave, the country of origin), I estimate that about 60% were from privileged backgrounds, and the other 40% were either from middle or working class backgrounds. Raines' father was a janitor, and Ward's father was at times a postman, at times a janitor, and he grew up in a small house with no running water. See Lawrence Mishel and Jori Kandra, 2020. 4 References. He was born in Iran to a very wealthy family that owned a diversified conglomerate that included pharmaceuticals, chemicals, food, distribution, packaging, trading, and various other services. [18] Phil Wahba. There are three CEOs who are not East Asians or South Asians, but they are not white men and their international backgrounds are both revealing and helpful as we seek to understand the pathways that lead to the CEO office. The appointments were enough to counteract some recent departures of female Fortune 500 chiefs, like the November exit of Michelle Gass from Kohls. Education will open doors, talent will open worlds, but it is hard work that will enable you to accomplish more than you ever imagined.. A week or so after that interview, I came upon a June 2020 article that had appeared in Fortune Magazine which asserted that there were five, not four, Fortune 500 African-American CEOs. Then, because I suspected that larger companies were more likely to include diversity in their leadership teams, I looked at those executives in the companies ranked between #251 and #275 that included photos and biographical information. ChesnotGetty Images. The share of female CEOs of Fortune 500 companies reached an all-time high of 7.4% in 2020, with 37 women heading major firms. [4] I have not been able to ascertain what her family situation was before she went to Wisconsin (I have not found evidence of this in the material that has been written about her, and she has not responded to the email I sent her). In 2018, Donte Robinson and Rashon Nelsontwo Black menwent into a Starbucks Philadelphia store for a business meeting. Catalyst places a high value on an individual's freedom to self-identify and understands that, outside of this self-identification, there will be difficulty in precisely verifying an individual's race, ethnicity, and . Not quite one in five (18.8%) were white women, 7.8% were Asians (mostly men), and 4.2% were Hispanic (mostly men). Kat Thomas is now CEO of Bare Performance Nutrition. She went to James Madison University, where she got a degree in finance and business administration. [1] The other one third were from middle- or working-class backgrounds. As can be seen in the far-right column of Table 1, the number of white women and people of color appointed each year gradually increased to a peak in 2011, when there were 13, and then to another slightly higher peak in 2019, when there were 17. The majority indicated that they thought of themselves as "Mexicans," "Puerto Ricans," "Cubans," or whatever their country of family origin.[17]. One such course is the Quantic MBA program. Only the South Asian CEOs in my sample had an average tenure longer than the average tenure for CEOs which, according to Fortune magazine, was 6.9 years in 2015. Others had fathers who were well-educated professionals, who owned businesses, or who were executives in large companies. On March 16th, 1970, 46 women researchers from Newsweek and their lawyer held a press conference. Moreover, since most of the seats lost by white men were lost to white women, and white women make up 6.8% of those who are now CEOs, whites still make up 92.6% of the Fortune 500 CEOs. Hitachi Vantara named Monica Kumar as its CMO. They are Muhtar Kent, the CEO of Coca-Cola from 2008-2017 (#83 in 2008, #64 in 2017), Nazzic Keene, who became the CEO of Science Application in 2020 (#466), and Dara Khosrowshahi, who became the CEO of Uber when it first made the Fortune list in 2020 (#228). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Born in Cuba, her parents, initially Castro supporters, but then disillusioned and imprisoned for counterrevolutionary activities, were able to leave the country and move to Minnesota when she was five, and then to New Jersey. In 2019, the compensation of the CEOs at the top 350 firms averaged $21.3 million, an increase of 14% from 2018. 2014. Asian American Panethnicity, Philadelphia: Temple University Press. LVMH chair Bernard Arnault appointed his daughter Delphine Arnault as CEO of Christian Dior as he tightens family control of the luxury goods empire. A Division of NBC Universal. Prior to Brewer and Duckett, Ursula Burns, CEO of Xerox from 2009 to 2016, was the first and only Black woman to permanently head a Fortune 500 firm. [25] If we were to look beyond the American-based companies in the Fortune 500, we would find even more flexible immigrants. How Many Fortune 500 CEOs Are Women? Thirteen were East Asians and 22 were South Asians (mostly people whose background is Indian). Interestingly, although there have been relatively few African-American Fortune 500 CEOs, and the number at any given time has remained flat, a higher percentage of the African-American CEOs have been at larger rather than smaller Fortune 500 companies than any of the other groups in my sample. After various positions, mergers, and acquisitions, she emerged as the newly appointed CEO. And for the first time, two Black women Roz Brewer from Walgreens Boots Alliance and Thasunda Brown Duckett from TIAA are serving as CEOs at the same time. There have been 35 men and women we are including in this umbrella term Asian-Americans who were CEOs of Fortune 500 companies between 2000 and 2020. As will be seen, some of the groups we have looked at have increased in numbers, whereas the numbers for others have remained stagnant. After he earned a BA from Brown University, he worked for a decade or so as an investment banker, and then became the CEO of Expedia, an online travel and meta-search engine, and by 2016 he was one of the highest paid CEOs in the country (he also received more than $90 million in stock options that year). Naomi Naik, a Girl Up Communications & Digital Media Associate, helped in adapting the global leadership summits of Girl Up, a leadership development movement that engages, trains, and mobilizes girls around the world to take action to achieve global gender equality, from in-person events to virtual ones due to the COVID-19 pandemic. 2014. However, in response to a rebellion from activist investors at Bed Bath and Beyond who were unhappy with the performance of the company, she was one of five new independent members who agreed to go on that Board. Most graduate programs coincide with childbearing years. Its not the majority, but its not an oddity. Back in 1963, when her husband committed suicide, Katherine Graham took overThe Washington Post, the newspaper her father had founded. http://whorulesamerica.net/diversity/diversity_update_2020.html. Many of the men either founded, or co-founded, their companies. The average Fortune ranking for the South Asians has been 239, and the median ranking has been #242. The following are further reasons why more women arent CEOs. To that end, were going to explore a few disruptive trends that will significantly affect your organization between now and 2030. Tech is an incredible force that will change our world in ways we cant anticipate. His father, an African-American sergeant in the U. S. Army who served under George Patton in World War II, met and married a Belgian woman. Yet, the new high still only translates to around 15 percent female representation at the top of the country's biggest public businesses. In the years that have followed, weve seen more female Fortune 500 CEOs, but not much has changed; women are still a minority with 8.1% as of 2021. Although Clifton Wharton, an African-American man, was the CEO of TIAA from 1987-1992, TIAA did not make the Fortune list until 1998, when he no longer was CEO. More . Six Michaels or Mikescongressmen from Alabama, Wisconsin, Illinois, Texas, Ohio, and Mississippiare committee chairs while only three womenReps. Other management shuffles helped the Fortune 500 reach this point. For example, Mary Dillon, the CEO of Ulta since 2013, a company that made the Fortune list in 2018 (at #471), is married to a biochemist who quit his job to stay home and take care of their three children. But even with this progress, she says "there's more work to do.". A few mention that they love scuba diving and at least one is a "certified" scuba diver (Tricia Griffith, CEO of Progressive, #86 in 2020). So . Sign up to get it delivered free to your inbox. The following are a few such executives. The average rank for the East Asian CEOs was #326, and the median rank was #336. In our previous work, we noted that very few of the first wave of women CEOs, who went to high school and college before Title IX was adopted in 1972, indicated that they had played competitive sports. For example, just to name two of the more recent additions to the list, Antonio Neri, born in Argentina, who in 2018 succeeded Meg Whitman as CEO of Hewlett Packard Enterprises (#109), speaks English, Spanish, Dutch and Italian, and Ramon LaGarta, born in Spain, who in 2018 replaced Indra Nooyi at Pepsico (#41), speaks English, Spanish, French, German, and Greek. The longest time in office was Indra Nooyi, CEO at Pepsico for twelve years, and Rajiv Gupta, the CEO of Rohm and Haas, for ten years, from 1999-2009 (#409 in 1999, #281 in 2009). Fully 11 of the 20 African-American CEOs have been at companies in the top 100, including Franklin Raines, CEO at Fannie Mae from 1999-2004, Stanley O-Neal at Merrill Lynch from 2002-2007, Kenneth Chenault at American Express from 2001-2017, and Kenneth Frazier, CEO at Merck since 2011. She was born in 1962 in Tripoli, Libya, to a Libyan father and a white American mother who had grown up in Tucson, Arizona. They found support for the "glass cliff" effect: women and men of color were significantly more likely than white men to have been appointed as CEOs at companies with weak performances. Two weeks after she resigned as CEO, the company declared bankruptcy. Seven months later, after the tenth straight quarter of declining sales, and the announcement that 60 stores were to be closed, the company hired an executive from Target to replace Winston. Over the course of several months, Korn Ferry interviewed 21 women CEOs - the majority of whom have been appointed within the last two years to lead Fortune 500 companies. When the first African-American Fortune 500 CEOs were appointed back in 1999, there was considerable media coverage. This indicates that about 91% of Fortune 500 CEOs are male. Emma Hinchliffe emma.hinchliffe@fortune.com @_emmahinchliffe. 2015. Therefore, ironically, both his parents are now Jewish, but he is not. As can be seen in Figure 2, which shows the number of women CEOs each year over this 20-year period, by far most of the new women CEOs have been white. BY Emma Hinchliffe and Kinsey Crowley. So when more women run this group of companies, it reflects the status of gender diversity in corporate leadership beyond this top cohort. We have called them the new CEOs to emphasize that they are not, like the old CEOswhite males. For instance, a 2010 DoL (Department of Labor) study found that women mainly feature in industries like education (68%), health, and social services (79%). [8], Nazzic Keene took a much less traditional path to corporate power than Muhtar Kent. Twenty years ago, Forbes says, women ran only two. Moreover, since most of the seats lost by white men were lost to white women, and white women make up 6.8% of those who are now CEOs, whites still make up 92.6% of the Fortune 500 CEOs. She remained on the Board. When she stepped down as CFO at Family Dollar, she decided, as she puts it, to "semi-retire." Jennifer A. Parmentier took over the motion and control technologies business Parker-Hannifin. Among the relatively few who will emerge are men and women with multicultural backgrounds, who are multilingual, and who can move comfortably in the global elite. It was a PR disaster for Starbucks and an opportunity for then COO Rosalind Brewer and her team. Not only that, a woman could work her way to the very pinnacle of career success. When she graduated, she went to work for Florida Power and Light, and stayed with that company for 24 years. A record number of Black CEOs are leading Fortune 500 companies after Dave Bozeman took over C.H. To continue to improve the slow, but steady progress of women in the C-suite, Hariton says establishing "clear targets and measurements to increase representation throughout the senior leadership and CEO pipelines" could be a solution. Business Insider, - Shareholder rush. The DEAC is listed by the United States Department of Education as a recognized accrediting agency and is also recognized by the Council for Higher Education Accreditation (CHEA). CNBC, - Beyond consumer. She attended the prestigious Hackley School and received her BA from UVA. We have concluded that our use of the term "Asian-Americans" to include people from many cultural backgrounds was even more limited than we realized. Turkey was not part of what is often called British India, and is not quite on the Asian subcontinent, but it is closer to India geographically than to our other, admittedly artificial, categories of African-Americans and Latinx. The father of Josue Robles, Jr. (the CEO of United Services Automobile Association from 2007 to 2015, #122 in 2015) came to the USA from Puerto Rico with only a fourth grade education and worked in steel mills for 35 years (Robles' mother had a ninth-grade education). In 1963, Katherine Graham took over The Washington Post, the newspaper her father had founded, after her husband committed suicide. (She went to Levis, a brand outside the Fortune 500.) He grew up in a small town in Massachusetts, went to Boston College, and then earned an MBA from the University of Rochester. 22. She was born in a small town in southeast China to a family with no education. Therefore, it was not until 1999, when Franklin Raines became CEO of Fannie May and Lloyd Ward became CEO of Maytag that there were African American CEOs ofFortune500 companies. According to Fortune, the top CEOs earned an average of $12.3M as of 2020. Networks significantly impact careers. A record number of 41 women are leading Fortune 500 companies today, according to Fortune's latest list. "I was totally against them and now I'm really starting to investigate and think about whether this would be helpful.". Strategic Management Journal, 35 (7), 1080-1089; https://doi.org/10.1002/smj.2161, [36] Scott DeCarlo and Anne Vandermey. The mean Fortune ranking for the 20 African-Americans was #188, and the median was #82, both of which were far lower than for any of the other groups. [37] The averages for the Asian and the Latinx CEOs were perhaps higher than those for white women and African-Americans because either they or their fathers were more likely to have founded the companies they led. Five Decades of Fortune 500 CEOs The incident made national headlines and brought to center stage the issue of racial bias. The next wave of women included more who had played sports in high school and some who had played in college. Their multicultural and often multilingual upbringing provided them with certain advantages, especially when it came to functioning effectively in differing cultures. However, when Ren Jones was appointed in 2017, the 18th African-American Fortune 500 CEO since 2000, it was not so newsworthy, and therefore easier to miss. The virtual summit gained the attention of global leaders and changemakers like former U.S. First Lady Michelle Obama, Meghan Markle, the Duchess of Sussex, and Facebook COO and Lean In Founder Sheryl Sandberg. For aeons, women have fought hard for gender diversity, therefore, even an increase of 1.2 percentage points in Women CEOs leading Fortune 500 companies is a big win. Further research, and the unforeseen rise of new "Asian-American" groups, reveals that "South Asians," mostly from India, but also from Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka, should be analyzed separately. Therefore, it was not until 1999, when Franklin Raines became CEO of Fannie May (#26) and Lloyd Ward became CEO of Maytag (#379), that there were Black CEOs of Fortune 500 companies. For example, Christine Leahy, CEO of CDW (#178 in 2020), played lacrosse and field hockey at Brown, and 6'2" Gail Boudreaux, the CEO of Anthem (#29), was an all all-Ivy League basketball player three years in a row at Dartmouth and won four straight Ivy League shot put titles. That is, she was not Jewish when Jide was growing up Arnold and Marian divorced in 1977 when Jide was 13 years old, and she later converted to Judaism. The averages were 4.8 years for the 16 African-American former CEOs, 6.4 for the 8 East Asian CEOs, and 7.1 for the 14 South Asian CEOs (I included the three who did not fall neatly into either East or South in this group for this analysis), and 5.7 for the 24 Latinx former CEOs, an overall average of 5.95 years. Calendly hired Asana's Jessica Gilmartin as CMO. As a result, companies dont need to hire extra staff or train existing ones, and work continues. All five were from privileged backgrounds. [32] Richard L. Zweigenhaft and G. William Domhoff. If a male CEO talked about strategy, its unlikely that anyone would focus on his clothes. Gradually, she moved through various positions before becoming senior vice president in charge of product operations. [33] Zweigenhaft and Domhoff. As we have seen, some of the South Asian and Latino CEOs have lived in many countries, are multilingual, and have overseen corporate divisions in countries or regions around the world before emerging as members of their companies' leadership teams, and then as CEOs. He did his undergraduate work, and a master's degree, in England, served in the Turkish military, and in 1978 came to the United States where he lived with an uncle and went to work for Coca-Cola. June 16, 2023, 5:45 . The added diversity to this year's list, according to Fortune, occurred as a result of executive leadership changes at different companies, new businesses gaining revenue growth that meets the $5.37 billion threshold and older businesses falling off as a result of their revenue shrinking. A weekly update of the most important issues driving the global agenda. "We continue to see steady progress in the Fortune 500, with a handful of women and two [new] women of color being elevated into CEO roles," Lorraine Hariton, CEO of the global gender equality firm Catalyst tells CNBC Make It. She has a BA in mechanical engineering from Kettering University, and an MA from Stanford. A few did undergraduate work in the United States. 1999. So, too, in late July, when Jide Zeitlin resigned as CEO of Tapestry, did the author of a July 22 New York Times article make the same mistake. June 2, 2021, 3:30 AM PDT In 2021, the number of women running businesses on the Fortune 500 hit an all-time record: 41. There are still just a handful of women of color who run Fortune 500 businesses, including TIAA CEO Thasunda Brown Duckett, Walgreens Boots Alliance CEO Roz Brewer, and Advanced Micro Devices CEO Lisa Su. 1992. Experience, exposure, and an MBA education go a long way towards climbing the corporate ladder. In 2016, in an article that I wrote which drew on these concepts of third culture kids and the flexible immigrant, I made what turned out to be a good prediction, when applied to Jide Zeitlin: "future black Americans who become CEOs might turn out to be immigrants from elite backgrounds in the West Indies or Africa. They have cultural backgrounds that are quite different from the "East Asians," the Chinese Americans, Japanese Americans and Korean Americans who were central to the Asian-American category that was created in the late 1960s and widely used for the next several decades. Here's what those employees say it's doing right. They are well-educated, with degrees from schools all over the world and from elite schools in the USA, including Harvard, Yale, Dartmouth, Stanford and Georgia Tech. The trend clearly shows that over time there have been fewer East Asian CEOs and more South Asian CEOs. Ren, now 55, is the youngest of their six children. Not counting the one interim appointment (Claire Babrowski at Radio Shack in 2007), and those who were still CEOs in 2020, the average length they were CEOs of Fortune-ranked companies was 6.1 years, with a range from 33 (Marian Sandler at Golden West from 1973 to 2006) to a few who lasted less than a year (Debra Crew at R. J. Reynolds in 2017, and Melissa Miller at Alliance Data Systems in 2019).