Walgreens CEO’s exit has left America Inc weak on diversity
Alliance Inc announced Friday that its chief executive, Rosalind Brewer, had resigned the day before. Brewer was the only African-American female CEO to run an S&P 500 company. With so few African-American women ever having gotten to the top of big US companies—other notables include former Xerox CEO Ursula Burns and Mary Winston as interim chief of Bed Bath & Beyond—Brewer’s departure deserves attention.
After Burns left Xerox, the Fortune 500 went five years without another African-American female CEO. The fact that there are so few at the helm of major companies itself creates a problem: One of the challenges such corporate leaders must overcome is isolation. In US C-suites, many African-American women must confront the reality of being “the only." Even if others have held senior roles before them, there are so few that it’s unusual to have more than one on a board or executive team at a time.
That can leave each one feeling like she’s reinventing the wheel. Whereas Caucasian women have long talked of a ‘glass ceiling,’ the term many African-American women use is a concrete wall. You can’t even see across it.
As Ella Bell Smith and Stella Nkomo write in their book Our Separate Ways, they “face special hurdles in the journey to the top and … when they get there, may find corporate America a lonely, hollow, haunted place." That’s among the reasons that African-American women are so over-represented among entrepreneurs: A 2021 study found that 17% of them were trying to start their own business, compared to only 10% of Caucasian women and 15% of Caucasian men. African-American women account for about 14% of the US female population and 42% of its new, women-owned businesses. Sidelining that hustle is corporate America’s
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