Gender Diversity is Not Enough

I had A DAY this week. One of those days where you feel like the universe must be telling you something. An alignment of events that had they occurred over the course of the week instead of in one day, I could possibly have ignored. But as luck would have it everything happened at once, and it was like a glaring spotlight on the issue of racial diversity in CEO positions.

It started early in the morning going through my LinkedIn feed and finding the article by Paolo Gaudian discussing why black leaders tend to be more successful than white. He does data analysis to prove his hypothesis: "If you can find an individual in a leadership role who belongs to a traditionally disadvantaged group, there is a good chance that this person will be measurably better than their peers who come from privileged backgrounds." This has always been my theory when prompted to explain why I fiercely advocate for women in STEM programs to CEO positions. I know firsthand how much harder these women have to work to rise to the top and be recognized than the men who go through the same classes and work the same jobs. That disadvantage spurs many to work harder, learn more and develop all types of hacks to be more efficient and productive. 

Later that day I had the pleasure of speaking to the indomitable Britt Stromberg. She writes the incredibly informative Underwire newsletter for female entrepreneurs (if you want to lift and separate, you should definitely sign up). I was telling her about CEOX and our mission, and she asked how I was going to include minority women in CEOX. I gave her the same spiel I wrote about in my earlier blog post on why I started CEOX, which was essentially that I thought by lifting women in general, I was also lifting up minority women. She very politely called me out on that. Nope. Not true at all. She said if you don’t put deliberate effort into recruiting minority women from the start then you are not doing enough. Point taken.

That evening as I was once again scrolling through Linkedin, I saw a post from someone I don’t know celebrating the placement of Mary Winston as the CEO of Bed Bath and Beyond. Ms. Winston is one of the few African American women to be a CEO of a Fortune 500 company. The only problem was that the article was from May, Ms. Winston was an interim CEO, and she had already been replaced by...wait for it...a white man. Shocking right? This led me down the rabbit hole of Google searches on black CEOs and that’s when this happened….

I wanted to know how many black men are CEOs of Fortune 500 companies and I typed in “How many black men are” and google gave me the following option:

This is what Google wanted to autofill when I was searching “How many black men are CEOs of Fortune 500 companies?”

What. The. Hell???

I don’t think I need to expound on how poorly that reflects on the state of racial parity in our country. But it did cement the idea that Britt had planted in my head earlier that I have to do the hard work of finding these minority female CEO-ready candidates even though it is hard. Even though it is hard and what I’m doing is already hard. Even though I don’t exactly know how I’m going to do it.

I went through and analyzed the CEOX list and was somewhat comforted that I didn’t just have a list of white women, but it is not enough. I will put more effort here and I invite you to look deep into your network and nominate a minority female CEO-ready candidate.