Walgreens CEO’s Exit Highlights Isolation of Black Female Leaders
Rosalind Brewer was the lone African-American woman to helm a company in the S&P 500.
The departure of Rosalind Brewer from the top job at Walgreens Boots Alliance leaves the S&P 500 without a single Black female CEO.
Photographer: Valerie Plesch/Bloomberg
Walgreens Boots Alliance Inc. announced Friday that its chief executive, Rosalind Brewer, had resigned the day before. Brewer was currently the only Black female CEO to run an S&P 500 company. Doubtless, Walgreens hoped to avoid making waves by putting out the news ahead of the Labor Day weekend. But when so few Black women have ever gotten to the top of the biggest companies in the US — other notable ones include former Xerox CEO Ursula Burns and Mary Winston as interim chief of Bed Bath & Beyond — Brewer’s departure deserves our attention. After Burns left Xerox, the Fortune 500 went five years without another Black female CEO.
The fact that there are so few Black women at the helm of major companies itself creates a problem: One of the challenges Black female corporate leaders must overcome is isolation. In US C-suites, many Black women must confront the reality of being “the only.” Even if other Black women 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 the first, reinventing the wheel. Whereas White women have long talked of a “glass ceiling,” the term many Black women use is a concrete wall. You can’t even see the other side.