Roz Brewer will make history as the only Black woman leading a Fortune 500 company when she takes over as Walgreens CEO on March 15. Brewer was tapped for the position while she was working as Starbucks’s COO and group president. She will succeed Stefano Pessina, who will become Walgreens’s executive chairman after serving as the drugstore’s CEO for six years.
“She is a distinguished and experienced executive who has led organizations globally through periods of changing consumer behavior by applying innovation that elevates customer experiences,” Pessina said, according to the Associated Press.
The new Walgreens CEO will bring her years of experience in operations, customer relations, talent development, and digital innovation. While working at Starbucks, she was responsible for revamping stores and making sure employees had the space to focus on customer service instead of administrative work. Brewer was a huge force in growing the coffee company’s rewards program and making sure there was diversity at all levels of the company. She’s also been candid about the challenges Black women face in corporate America.
“When you’re a Black woman, you get mistaken a lot,” she said during a 2018 speech at her alma mater Spelman College. “You get mistaken as someone who could actually not have that top job. Sometimes you’re mistaken for kitchen help. Sometimes people assume you’re in the wrong place, and all I can think in the back of my head is, No, you’re in the wrong place.”
When speaking at the all-women HBCU, she told the story of a time she attended a CEO-only event during her run as Sam’s Club CEO. The now Walgreens CEO said she introduced herself to the men in the room as “Roz Brewer of Sam’s Club,” and one man asked if she led marketing. Puzzled by the question since it was a CEO-exclusive event, she replied, “No, that’s part of my organization.”
Brewer’s appointment is a step in the right direction, but her experience proves there’s still a long way to go. Watch Now: Glamour Video.
(Bloomberg) — Along Citigroup Inc.’s path to naming the first female chief executive officer on Wall Street, the bank had to confront some grim truths.
For starters, the bank that Jane Fraser takes over in February pays women just 73 cents for every $1 men get, an even wider gap than the national average. And short of 40% of Citigroup’s managers are female.
Those figures show that Fraser’s historic elevation is far from a capstone. But the bank has spent years getting to this point, and a willingness to publicly face its shortcomings has helped it outpace rivals in many key measures of progress on Wall Street’s slow road to gender equality.
“These things don’t just happen,” said Jeanne Branthover, a managing partner in the global financial-services practice at the executive search firm DHR International. “They made sure they were identifying people to move up the ladder that were not just men.”
Fraser, 53, offers a sign of the advance and an expectation for more. When she takes over, the bank’s 16-member board will be half female, a far cry from the three women that sat on the board during the last CEO handover eight years ago. The executive management team is also stocked with women overseeing functions such as compliance and regulatory affairs — critical areas as the bank prepares for increased regulatory scrutiny of its infrastructure and controls in the coming months.
Sara Wechter was CEO Michael Corbat’s only female direct report when he rose to the top job eight years ago. Now Citigroup’s head of human resources, Wechter credits Corbat with the strides made in female representation. But she said there’s more to do.
“We need all of the thousands of managers to be as dedicated as the executive management team is,” Wechter said in an interview. “This has been something we’ve been working on year after year.”
Citigroup’s campaign for greater gender equity got a fresh spark five years into Corbat’s tenure: He and then-Chairman Mike O’Neill appeared at the company’s 2017 annual meeting, arguing against a shareholder proposal filed by Arjuna Capital that would require the bank to publish a report about its policies and plans to reduce the gender pay gap.
The moment was cringe-worthy: In a stilted back-and-forth with multiple shareholders, Corbat and O’Neill conceded that they supported the idea of reducing pay disparities, but argued releasing the data wouldn’t help. After the meeting, Corbat and other members of the board believed their answers fell short and decided they wanted to make Citigroup a leader on the issue.
“Citigroup has worn their work on gender equity as a badge of honor in a different way, in a more authentic way, than the other banks,” said Natasha Lamb, a managing partner at Arunja, which has long pushed for banks to disclose more about their gender pay disparities.
A year later, the bank announced it would seek to boost the number of women managers in roles from assistant vice president to managing directors within three years to 40%, up from 37% at that time.
In 2019, the bank revealed the pay gap between men and women in its global workforce. It was an ugly number that showed men held most of the highest paying jobs at the bank. But, to this day, it’s one of only a handful of companies to offer such transparent pay disclosure.
“To really make lasting change, we know we need to take a comprehensive approach – board and senior level representation, benefits and support for female colleagues, male allyship, examining and disclosing what the data was telling us and using our voice to draw attention to this very important issue,” Corbat, 60, said in a statement.
Citigroup has sought to seize on the moment, developing an ad showing employees’ daughters at the moment they first learned about the gender pay gap and unequal opportunities. Many of them displayed anger or confusion.
Gender issues are far from Fraser’s only challenge. One of the first orders of business will be cleaning up the firm’s infrastructure and controls as regulators, including the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency and the Federal Reserve, weigh whether to publicly reprimand the bank over continued deficiencies. She’ll also be charged with improving Citigroup’s returns, which lag behind peers.
Fraser won the top job because the board believed she could best tackle those challenges. A bonus of her taking that role, Wechter said, is it will help the bank hire, promote and keep talented women.
That impact is significant to people like Erica Witte, a director in Citigroup’s trading division. Witte was driving her daughter Paige to her first day of kindergarten when she told her the news about Fraser’s promotion.
“Guess what, mommy’s big company where she now works will now be run by a mommy too. This will be the first time a mommy is the big boss,” Witte said in an email to colleagues.
“Paige said, ‘Really? Can I be a mommy boss too one day?’”
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The diversity part seems straightforward enough. But what’s meant by inclusion?
As a social work scholar, I study how leaders create socially just, equitable and inclusive workplaces, particularly when they have a diverse workforce. A recent study I conducted with social policy scholar Lawrence Palinkas examined how employees perceive leaders who are inclusive – and those who aren’t.
The value of inclusion
Companies have long focused on trying to make their workforces more diverse. But resesearch shows that simply enhancing the representation of employees from diverse backgrounds is not enough. To fully tap into the positive outcomes of diversity, organizations need to focus on inclusion.
Inclusion also enhances employee well-being and can lead workers to perceive fairness in decision-making, such as when colleagues are promoted.
The U.S. Census estimates that within a couple decades over half of all Americans will be members of a racial or ethnic minority group, which means creating more inclusive workplaces will be vital to keeping their future workforces happy, engaged and productive.
So we know inclusion is good for employees and workplaces, but what is less well understood is what leaders can do to exhibit inclusiveness – the goal of our study.
Over a period of two years, we surveyed employees in a department of a large nonprofit hospital located in a diverse urban city in California. We sent them three online surveys at six-month intervals, conducted six in-person organizational observations and confidentially interviewed 20 employees from a variety of different job positions, genders and racial and ethnic backgrounds to ensure we captured a wide variety of employee perspectives.
In the one-on-one interviews, we asked employees what they believed inclusive leadership was and to provide examples of what leaders do – or do not do – to help employees feel included. Because people tend to remember negative experiences more than positive ones, we asked them to start by describing leaders who did not help them feel valued.
What a less inclusive leader looks like
Less inclusive leaders were described as having talent blindness, meaning they were unable to recognize employees’ unique strengths. They treated all employees the same regardless of how hard they worked or whether they needed additional training and did not seem to value employees for their contributions.
These leaders discouraged others from sharing their ideas or excluded employees from important meetings if they did not agree with the manager’s views. Participants also described less inclusive leaders as having a tendency to blame others when things went wrong and to create divides among employees by using “us versus them” language.
Employees described less inclusive leaders as being dishonest and unclear in their communication. One said that less inclusive leaders often talk about their values and beliefs but behaved in very different ways.
For example, employees described one less inclusive leader as always telling everyone that they are honest and transparent. However, in day-to-day interactions, they were neither.
One employee said, “the [leader] never tells me the truth. In my evaluations they say all positive things but never the things I need to work on. I know I’m not being promoted for a reason, but they just don’t want to tell me. I trust the leader more if they are honest or transparent.”
Leading with inclusion
The employees described inclusive leaders, on the other hand, as leaders who act in ways that demonstrate their values and communicate openly and honestly. They treat each employee as a unique individual, recognize each person’s strengths and value diverse perspectives.
One employee recalled an experience where someone on their team needed extra shifts during the holidays to afford medical care for an ill family member. Their manager brought the team together and asked if everyone would be willing to donate one of their shifts. This employee described this experience as being inclusive because the leader was sensitive to the unique needs of one of their team members, and felt that if they needed help the leader and team would do this for them.
Inclusive leaders were also described as asking others for feedback when making important decisions and providing everyone access to critical information. They encourage everyone to work together as a team and go out of their way to make sure employees of all job positions are valued and encouraged to be involved.
As companies strive to fulfill their pledges to improve workplace inclusion and decide whom to promote to leadership positions, they should bear in mind what their employees actually say about what makes someone an inclusive leader. I believe that’s one of the best ways to ensure workers feel equally valued with a shared sense of purpose.
Kim Brimhall received funding from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality . Microsoft may earn an Affiliate Commission if you purchase something through recommended links in this article.
(Reuters) – Former Goldman Sachs Group Inc executive Marty Chavez said on Tuesday Wall Street’s position on diversity has evolved since he started at the megabank in the 1990s. Chavez, who is Latino and openly gay, said he hesitated when he was first offered a position on Wall Street, fearing Goldman Sachs might see his identity as a gay man as a liability.
“I just blurted out to the gentleman who was hiring me – I think I need to tell you that I’m gay. And this was 1993,” Chavez said, speaking on SALT Talks, a series of digital interviews with “investors, creators and thinkers.”
“All he could think of to say was, ‘Hey, do you have a boyfriend?’ Which is I think maybe not the response you would have in 2020, but I took that to mean, woah, this must be a gay friendly place,” he said. “I think it would have been more accurate for me to have concluded that this was a place that didn’t care if I was straight or gay. It just cared that I was good at math and software.”
Chavez retired as Goldman Sachs’ co-head of the securities division at the end of last year.
The banking industry has come under fire for a lack of racial and gender diversity in the wake of the “Me Too” movement and global protests over racial injustice.
Once considered a potential CEO candidate, Chavez held a number of roles during his 19 years at the firm, including chief information officer and chief financial officer.
Chavez said during his time on Wall Street, firms “began to understand that diversity of your workforce was like diversification of your portfolio.”
But he said that there was a long way to go, and noted that his mentors were all “straight white Jewish males.”
“If I had been waiting for a Latino mentor, or an LGBT mentor, or God forbid, one who is both Latino and LGBT, I’d still be out there waiting.”
(Reporting by Noor Zainab Hussain and Nishant Niket in Bengaluru; Editing by Sonya Hepinstall)
(Bloomberg) — A new coalition of institutional investors and advisers overseeing more than $3 trillion in assets is pushing U.S. public companies to disclose the racial makeup of their boards in a bid to increase the diversity of corporate directors.
The Diversity Disclosure Initiative, headed by Illinois State Treasurer Michael Frerichs and Connecticut State Treasurer Shawn Wooden, is pressing companies in the Russell 3000 Index to voluntarily reveal the racial and ethnic composition of their boards. Many of the members of the new group already have or are considering policies to vote against the members of nominating committees that don’t report board racial or ethnic makeup in their annual proxy statements.
In a letter sent today to all the members of the index — which includes most of the publicly traded companies in the U.S. — the group said it is calling for more disclosure in the wake of the Black Lives Matter protests that followed the police killing of George Floyd earlier this year. The consortium is asking the public companies that don’t divulge board racial, ethnic and gender data in proxy statements to do so in future filings, starting in 2021. Few companies now make that information public.
Many U.S. companies are for the first time disclosing the racial breakdown of their employees. As part of a push by New York City Comptroller Scott Stringer, who also signed the letter, Amazon.com Inc., General Motors Co. and Goldman Sachs Group Inc. are among the companies that this year agreed to report workforce racial, gender and ethnicity data.
“This comes from a desire to do more when our country’s at this racial crossroads,” Connecticut’s Wooden said in an interview.
The percentage of Black directors remains low among the boards of the largest U.S. companies, according to an Oct. 25 analysis from executive recruiter Russell Reynolds Associates. The percentage of directors who are Black, Asian, Hispanic or other members of other racial or ethnic minorities passed 10% for the first time last year in the Russell 3000, according to the study. Black directors were the largest group, at 4.1%. In the S&P 500, the number of Black directors rose in 2019, even as the number of companies with Black directors fell; 37% of boards lacked a Black director last year, Russell Reynolds found.
Institutional investors in the roughly $89 trillion asset-management industry can use their leverage to get corporations to recognize that diversity benefits the bottom line, too, Frerichs and Wooden said. A 2020 McKinsey & Co. report showed that companies in the top quartile for executive ethnic or cultural diversity were 36% more likely to outperform on profitability than those in the bottom quartile.
“The research is fairly clear,” Frerichs said in an interview. “Those who refuse this want to perpetuate the way things have been done in the past — they are the ones who are not doing their jobs as fiduciaries.”
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Citi’s Female CEO Rose as Bank Faced Failings on Gender Equality 
© Bloomberg Gender Breakdown
