Diversity Among Fortune 500 CEOs from 2000 to 2020: White Women, Hi-Tech South Asians, and Economically Privileged Multilingual Immigrants from Around the World

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Diversity Among Fortune 500 CEOs from 2000 to 2020:
White Women, Hi-Tech South Asians, and
Economically Privileged Multilingual Immigrants from
Around the World
by Richard L. Zweigenhaft, Guilford College
Posted November 2020
In 1963, Katherine Graham took over The Washington Post, the newspaper her father had
founded, after her husband committed suicide. When the Washington Post made the Fortune
500 list in 1972 (it was #479), she became the first woman CEO of a Fortune 500 company.
In 1981, when he became the CEO at Coca Cola (#56 on the list that year), Cuban-born
Roberto Goizueta became the first Latino CEO of a Fortune 500 company. In 1986, Gerald
Tsai, a Chinese American, became the CEO of American Can (#140 in 1986). 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. 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.
Since 2000, there have been 151 white women and people of color appointed CEOs at
Fortune 500 companies. We have called them "The New CEOs" to emphasize that they are
not, like the old CEOs, white males. But now, 20 years later, the New CEOs are not so new,
and there are enough of them so that it is possible to step back and look at the patterns that
have emerged over these two decades. That is what I plan to do in this report. As will be
seen, some of the groups we have looked at have increased in numbers, whereas the
numbers for others have remained stagnant. In some cases, the original groupings that we
used decades ago no longer suffice, for now we can see that those born into some subgroups
are much more likely than those born into others to become Fortune 500 CEOs. In addition,
in this paper I'll compare these 151 New CEOs who have made it to the top of these giant,
very hierarchical, corporations, with the similarly "new" members of Congress, the white
women and people of color who have been elected to the Senate and the House. Are white
women and people of color more likely to have made it to the top of the corporate world or
through the electoral process?
The big picture: white men and everyone else
Before looking at the patterns for each of the groups who make up the New CEOs, it is
helpful to keep the larger picture in mind by noting that it is still the case that almost 90% of

the Fortune 500 CEOs are white males. As can be seen in Figure 1, the slow increase in
New CEOs, from a total of 19 in 2000 to 71 in 2020, has been accompanied by a
corresponding steady decrease in the number of white male CEOs. Still, the white men, who
make up about 35% of the population, continue to be very much over-represented, and the
gap between them and the New CEOs is still immense. White men may have lost power, but
they continue to be the dominant group in the corporate elite — they held 96.4% of the
Fortune 500 CEO positions in 2000, and they held 85.8% in 2020. 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. Only 1%
of the Fortune 500 CEOs are African-Americans, 2.4% are East Asians or South Asians,
and 3.4% are Latinx.
Figure 1: White male CEOs and "New CEOs" in the Fortune 500, 2000-2020
0%
10%
20%
30%
40%
50%
60%
70%
80%
90%
100%
2000
2001
2002
2003
2004
2005
2006
2007
2008
2009
2010
2011
2012
2013
2014
2015
2016
2017
2018
2019
2020
White male
CEOs
New CEOs
Another metric that helps reveal the long-term patterns is the number of new Fortune 500
CEOs appointed each year (as opposed to the number who were in office in a given year).
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. Whereas the 2011 peak
was based on the appointments of five white women, one African-American, three Latinx,
one East Asian and three South Asians, the peak in 2019 was largely the result of the
appointments of white women: 10 were appointed that year, along with four Latinos, two

African-Americans, and one South Asian. In 2020, 7 of the 10 new appointments were
white women.
Table 1: New "New CEOs" (new appointments), by year, 2000-2020
White
women
African
Americans Latinx
East
Asians
South
Asians TOTAL
2000 0 0 0 0 1 1
2001 3 2 0 0 0 5
2002 2 1 2 0 0 5
2003 1 0 0 0 0 1
2004 1 1 2 2 1 7
2005 1 2 3 0 0 6
2006 3 1 1 1 1 7
2007 3 1 1 1 2 8
2008 3 2 1 1 2 9
2009 1 1 1 1 0 4
2010 0 0 1 0 2 3
2011 5 1 3 1 3 13
2012 5 1 1 0 1 8
2013 4 0 2 0 0 6
2014 4 0 1 1 1 7
2015 0 1 6 0 3 10
2016 5 0 3 0 0 8
2017 7 0 1 1 1 9
2018 2 0 3 1 0 6
2019 10 2 4 0 1 17
2020 7 0 0 0 3 10
TOTAL 67 16 36 10 22 151
A separate look at the New CEOs for each group reveals very different patterns between the
groups, and in some cases, within the groups.
White women CEOs
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. Of the 83 women
who have been CEOs of Fortune 500 companies since 2000, 72 have been white women.

There were twice as many white women Fortune 500 CEOs in 2020 as there were in 2010.
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). Some have worked at the largest
companies in the Fortune 500 (for example, Mary Barra, who has been CEO of General
Motors since 2014, Carly Fiorina, who was CEO at Hewlett Packard from 1999-2005, and
Virginia Rometty, CEO at IBM from 2012 through April 2020) and others at the smallest
companies. The median ranking has been #275 which means there has been a slight
tendency for the white women to have been at the smaller rather than the larger companies.
Figure 2: Women CEOs, 2000-2020
0%
1%
2%
3%
4%
5%
6%
7%
8%
2000
2001
2002
2003
2004
2005
2006
2007
2008
2009
2010
2011
2012
2013
2014
2015
2016
2017
2018
2019
2020
Latina
women
Black
women
Asian
women
white
women
The white women who have been appointed since 2015 seem to be quite similar to the white
women CEOs appointed before them: they are very well-educated, tend to be from
privileged backgrounds, almost all are married and have children, and many were, or still
are, athletes.
These 72 well-educated white women include many who have degrees from Ivy League
schools (four from Harvard, three from Princeton, three from Penn), Stanford (five),
Wellesley (three), and the University of Chicago (two), as well as many who attended the
flagship state schools where they grew up (including the University of Texas in Austin, the

University of Wisconsin in Madison, and the University of Washington in Seattle). Fully 28
(or 38%) have MBA degrees, five have JD degrees, and others have masters or PhD
degrees.
Almost all of those for whom I could find information were, or had been, married, and most
had children. Many are married to high-powered executive husbands, but notably, some
have reported that their husbands gave up careers to take care of the children. 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.
Also, notably, and certainly a sign that things not only have changed in the culture but in the
corporate elite, in August 2018, the Board of Land O'Lakes (#212) announced the
appointment of the first openly gay female Fortune 500 CEO, Beth Ford. Ford and her wife,
Jill Schurtz (a West Point graduate, and a lawyer), are raising three teen-age daughters. With
this appointment, Ford became the second openly gay Fortune 500 CEO, Tim Cook of
Apple having been the first when he came out as a gay man in October 2014 (#5 in 2014, #4
in 2020) In April, 2019, James Fitterling became the third, and the first male board-
appointed out CEO when he became CEO at Dow (#78 in 2020).
I was unable to obtain information about the class backgrounds for some of the white
women CEOs in 2020, but for those I could I conclude that about two-thirds are from
privileged or relatively privileged backgrounds where the parents were well-educated
professionals, and in some cases, quite wealthy. That is, they were from the upper 15% of
the class structure as defined by Dennis Gilbert in his book, The American Class Structure
in an Age of Growing Inequality, 9th Edition. The other one third were from middle- or
working-class backgrounds.
Consider the five white women who first became CEOs of companies that appeared on the
Fortune 2020 list (some were appointed in late 2019 or during 2020, and others had been
CEOs for a while but their companies first made the list in 2020). All five were from
privileged backgrounds. Carol Tome, UPS (#43), grew up in Jackson, Wyoming, where her
father owned a bank. The father of Heyward Donegan, Rite Aid (#150) was an executive at
IBM, and her mother became an Episcopalian priest when Heyward was 14. She attended
the prestigious Hackley School and received her BA from UVA. Kristin Peck, Zoetis (#472)
a Georgetown graduate with an MBA from Columbia, is the daughter of a media executive
father and an interior decorator mother (her wedding announcement, like that of Heyward
Donegan, appeared in the New York Times). Barbara Smith, CEO of Commercial Metals
(#491), was one of nine children, but she reports that her grandfather and her father owned
"several" businesses. Finally, Jennifer Johnson, CEO of Franklin Resources (#493) is the
granddaughter of the founder of the company; her father was the CEO for many years, then
her brother became CEO, and now she has succeeded her brother.
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. In fact, the most frequent topic related to sports for the first wave
[1]

of women CEOs was the complaint that they, unlike the white men they worked with, had
not grown up playing golf and either had to learn to play or risk missing out on the benefits
that accrued from the business-related interactions that took place on the golf course. The
next wave of women included more who had played sports in high school and some who
had played in college. In interviews, these women often emphasized how important being
on teams had been for their development as leaders. Now, like those in that second wave,
many of the women in this newest group make clear that having been on teams, or at least
being fit, is important to them. Some report that they get up at 5 in the morning to get a run
in before their long day begins. 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). Many are
runners, and at least one has completed numerous triathlons (Kristin Peck, CEO of Zoetis,
#472 in 2020). Some were college athletes. 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.
African-American, Latinx, and Asian-American CEOs
As can be seen in Figure 3, the patterns have been quite different for African-American,
Asian-American, and Latinx CEOs.
Figure 3: Women, African-American, Asian-American, and Latinx CEOs, 2000-2020
0%
1%
2%
3%
4%
5%
6%
7%
8%
2000
2001
2002
2003
2004
2005
2006
2007
2008
2009
2010
2011
2012
2013
2014
2015
2016
2017
2018
2019
2020
women
Latinx
Asian
Black

African-American CEOs
African-American men
The most striking feature of the line in Figure 3 for African-Americans is how flat it is.
There were five African-American CEOs in 2004, and there were five in 2020. There had
been as many as seven for a few years, and the number dipped to three and four in some
years.
In all, 20 African-Americans were Fortune 500 CEOs between 2000 and 2020, 18 men and
two women (neither of whom was still in office in 2020). The African-American CEO in
office the longest was Kenneth Chenault, at American Express for 16 years, from 2001
through 2017 (#74 in 2001, #86 in 2017). Roger Ferguson, of TIAA-CREF, has been in that
position since 2008, so he is in his twelfth year (#86 in 2008, #81 in 2020). One of the
African-American men, James Bell at Boeing in 2005, was an interim appointment who
served for less than a year (#25 in 2005). If we don't count Bell, the interim appointment, or
the five African-Americans still in office in 2020, the 12 African-American male CEOs
were in office for an average of 5.8 years (about the same as the white women), with a range
from Chenault's 16 years to Lloyd Ward, who lasted at Maytag for a little over a year, from
August 1999 through November 2000.
Unlike the other early New CEOs who broke Fortune 500 barriers by becoming the first
woman CEO (Katharine Graham at the Washington Post), the first Latinx CEO (Roberto
Goizueta at Coca Cola) and the first Asian-American CEO (Gerald Tsai at American Can),
the first two African-American Fortune 500 CEOs, Franklin Raines, the CEO at Fannie
Mae from 1999-2004, and Lloyd Ward, the CEO of Maytag from 1999-2000, grew up in
working class families. 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.
Of the groups I have looked at, the 20 African-American CEOs are the least likely to have
been born to privilege. The five African-American CEOs in office in 2020 reveal the varied
socioeconomic backgrounds that can lead to these positions, but also the importance of
education. Roger Ferguson Jr. became the CEO of TIAA-CREF in 2008 (it was #86 on the
Fortune list that year). One of his grandfathers was an architect, his father was a cartologist
in the U. S. Army, and his mother was a public school teacher. He went to the elite
Washington prep school, Sidwell Friends, and then to Harvard, from which he received his
BA, a JD, and a PhD (in economics). Kenneth Frazier became CEO of Merck in 2011 (#53
that year). His father was a janitor in Philadelphia. He received his BA from Penn State and
went on to earn a JD from Harvard. Marvin Ellison became the CEO of J. C. Penney's in
2015 (#250), and then became the CEO of Lowe's in 2018 (#42). His parents were
sharecroppers, and also gospel singers who recorded four albums. He received his BA from
the University of Memphis, and an MBA from Emory.
René Jones became the CEO of M&T Bank in 2017 (#438). 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. René, now 55, is the youngest of their six children. He grew

Jide Zeitlin
up in a small town in Massachusetts, went to Boston College, and then earned an MBA
from the University of Rochester.
Perhaps the most unusual story is that of Jide Zeitlin, who became the
CEO of Tapestry in September 2019 (#485), but ten months later, in
July 2020, he resigned abruptly. Olajide (Jide) Abayomi was born in
Ibadan, Nigeria. His single mother commuted into Lagos to clean the
house of Arnold Zeitlin, a journalist with the Associated Press, and his
wife, Marian, whose father was the chair of the chemistry department
at the University of Pittsburgh. Sometimes Jide's mother brought her
little boy with her, and he hit it off with the Zeitlins' daughter who was
about the same age. 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. When, 18 months later, Arnold was posted to
Pakistan, Arnold and Marian offered to take five-year-old Jide with them. They became his
legal guardians, and later adopted him. After five years in Pakistan, and three years in the
Philippines, Marian was accepted into a PhD program at MIT in biochemistry, and Jide
moved with the family to Cambridge, MA. Then, in an educational trajectory that has
worked for so many white CEOs who grew up in privileged backgrounds, he went to the
elite Milton Academy, to Amherst College (from which he graduated magna cum laude with
a double major in Economics and English), and then earned an MBA from Harvard. He
worked for Goldman Sachs for 20 years, went on the Tapestry board in 2006, became
chairman of the board in 2014, and became the CEO of that company in late 2019. Along
the way, he was on the board at Milton, and on the board at Amherst College from 1993 to
2013 (he was the Chair of that board from 2005 to 2013). While at Harvard he met Tina
Goldberg, they married, and have two children.
I know what you are wondering (well, as someone who has been studying Jews in the
corporate elite for 40 years, I was wondering): is Jide Zeitlin Jewish? He is not. His father,
Arnold, is Jewish, but his mother, Marian was not. 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. Therefore, ironically, both his parents are now Jewish, but he
is not. What about the wife he met at Harvard, Tina Goldberg? Her name definitely sounds
Jewish, and Goldberg is on the list of Distinctive Jewish Names that we have used in our
research over the years to estimate the number of Jewish directors on Fortune 500 boards,
but she is a false positive: her father was Jewish, but not a practicing Jew, and her mother
was not Jewish. She was not raised as a Jew, nor have Jide and Tina raised their two sons as
Jews.
In July 2020, Zeitlin announced his immediate resignation as CEO and Chair of the Board at
Tapestry. Some months earlier, the Board had begun an investigation based on an allegation
about an inappropriate relationship he had with a woman a decade earlier. A reporter was
soon to break a story about this affair, and Zeitlin decided to try to control the narrative by
telling the story himself in a letter to the Board of Directors that he posted on LinkedIn. As
[2]

he grew up, he explained in this letter, he had learned photography from some of the
photographers who worked with his father when his father was a journalist for Associated
Press. He spent a summer working in the AP photography department, and he continued to
take photographs, and publish them under a pseudonym, even as he rose through the ranks
as a banker at Goldman Sachs. In that capacity, using the alias of "James Green," he set up a
studio and took photos of many women (it is alleged in the article that subsequently was
published that some were nude photographs). He developed a relationship with one of those
women. Ultimately, he revealed his actual identity to her, and the relationship ended. As he
put it, "our relationship began and concluded 13 years ago, it had nothing to do with my role
at Tapestry, and I did not use power, wealth, or position to further that relationship... I am
the first person to acknowledge that I am human, for better and worse. I made a mistake in
having a relationship with this woman and I dealt with that in my personal life at the time."
African-American women
There have been only two African-American women CEOs of Fortune companies. The first
was Ursula Burns, the CEO of Xerox, from 2009 to 2016 (Xerox was #147 in 2009, and
#150 in 2016). Burns grew up in the projects, the daughter of a single mother who took in
ironing. She attended a Catholic high school, and received her BA in engineering from
NYU. While a graduate student at Columbia, Burns participated in a summer internship for
minorities at Xerox, and when she completed her degree she went to work for that company.
She stayed with Xerox, working her way up through the management ranks.
The other African-American woman, Mary Winston, served as interim CEO of Bed Bath
and Beyond for less than a year, from May 2019 through November 2019 (#258 in 2019).
She received a BA from Wisconsin and an MBA from Northwestern. She began her
career as a CPA at Arthur Anderson and then became the chief financial officer at a number
of major corporations. When she stepped down as CFO at Family Dollar, she decided, as
she puts it, to "semi-retire." 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. Not long thereafter,
the CEO announced that he was resigning as CEO and from the Board "immediately."
Winston became the interim CEO. 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. She remained on the Board.
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. 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. The mean Fortune
[3]
[4]

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.
Asian-American CEOs
We have learned over the years that our original category of Asian-Americans was far too
encompassing. The immigrant groups from a wide range of Asian countries included under
that label do not share a common language, national heritage, or immigration pattern. The
term "Asian-American" first appeared in 1968 in an effort to develop pan-Asian
organizations to resist discrimination and ensure a fair share of social services at the local
level. However, these different groups often remain wary of one another because of
historic enmities between their native countries.
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. 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. 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.
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. Thirteen
were East Asians and 22 were South Asians (mostly people whose background is Indian),
East Asians
The 13 East Asians include nine men and four women. Many of the men either founded, or
co-founded, their companies. For example, Charles B. Wang, born in Shanghai in 1944,
founded Computer Associates International in 1996, Jerry Yang, born in Taiwan in 1968,
was the co-founder of Yahoo, Robert Huang, born in 1945 in Taiwan, founded Synnex, and
Jen-Hsun ("Jensen") Huang, born in 1963 in Taiwan, founded Nvidia. Seven of the nine
were born outside of the USA, and the other two were first-generation Japanese Americans
born in this country.
It is very difficult to get information about the class backgrounds for some of them, so
generalizations must be made with caution. A few, including two of those who founded or
co-founded companies, Wang and Huang, came from privilege, and a few clearly came from
poverty. Others, however, have revealed either no information or only bits and pieces.
The four East Asian women all have Chinese American backgrounds. Andrea Jung, a
Chinese American born in Canada, was the CEO of Avon from 1999 through 2012 (Avon
was #308 in 1999, and #234 in 2012). Laura Sen, a Chinese American born in the USA, was
the CEO of BJ's Wholesale Club from 2009-2012 (#269 in 2009, #221 in 2012). Lisa Su, a
Chinese American born in Taiwan, became the CEO of Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) in
2014, and was still the CEO in 2020 (#474 in 2014, #448 in 2020). Finally, Joey Wat, who
[5]

was born in southern China, became CEO of Yum China in 2018 (#397), and was still in
office in 2020 (#361).
Three of the four women come from privileged or relatively privileged backgrounds. Jung's
father was an architect, and her mother was chemical engineer (and a pianist). Su's father
was a statistician and her mother an accountant. Sen's father was a highway engineer. Wat,
however, grew up in real poverty. She was born in a small town in southeast China to a
family with no education. Her father, whom she described to one interviewer as having
"street smarts," had no formal education, and the family was unable to enroll her in school
until she was seven.
None of the 13 East Asian CEOs has led a company in the top 100 (the East Asian CEO
who led the highest-ranking Fortune company was Richard Hamada, CEO of Avnet from
2011 through 2016 — it was #132 in 2011, and #102 in 2016). The average rank for the East
Asian CEOs was #326, and the median rank was #336.
South Asians
The 22 South Asian CEOs include 20 men and two women. Seventeen of the 20 men were
born in India, one was born in Pakistan, one in Sri Lanka, and one was born to Indian
parents in Kenya. Most did their undergraduate work abroad (seven at the elite Indian
Institute of Technology) and then came to the USA for graduate work. They hold graduate
degrees from Harvard, Columbia, Chicago, and Michigan, among other schools. Many are
engineers with undergraduate and graduate degrees in chemical engineering, electrical
engineering, and mechanical engineering.
A few did undergraduate work in the United States. For example, Vikram Pandit, the CEO
at Citibank from 2007 through 2012 (#8 in 2007, #20 in 2012), holds BS and MA degrees
(both in electrical engineering) and a PhD (in finance) from Columbia, and George Kurian,
the CEO at Netapp since 2015 (#428 in 2015, #478 in 220), has a BA (in electrical
engineering) from Princeton and an MBA from Stanford.
Indra Nooyi, the CEO of Pepsico from 2006 to 2018 was the first South Asian woman to
become a Fortune 500 CEO (Pepsico was #63 in 2006, #45 in 2018). Born in Madras in
1955, she majored in physics, chemistry and mathematics at Madras Christian College. She
then surprised her Brahmin parents by coming to the USA to study at the Yale School of
Management (as she put it, "It was unheard of for a good, conservative, South Indian
Brahmin girl to do this"), and that led to jobs, first with the Boston Consulting Group, and
then Motorola, before she went to work at Pepsico and began a climb through management
ranks that led to the CEO office in 2006.
The other South Asian woman who has been a Fortune 500 CEO, Sonia Syngal, was born in
India in 1971, but her parents moved to Canada when she was young, and then they
relocated to the USA (I have not been able to find anything about her parents' education or
careers, but the fact that they were able to emigrate to Canada suggests they were educated).
She has a BA in mechanical engineering from Kettering University, and an MA from
Stanford. After ten years with Sun Microsystems, and six years with Ford Motor Company,
[6]

Muhtar Kent
she went to work for Gap in 2014. After leading one of its companies, Old Navy, she
became the CEO in March 2020 (#199 on the Fortune list).
Other than those currently in office, the average length of time as CEO for the South Asians
who were CEOs of companies on the Fortune 500 list was 6.4 years. 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). Six of the 20
South Asians have been CEOs of companies in the top 100, including Vikram Pandit, CEO
at Citigroup from 2007-2012, Satya Nadella, CEO at Microsoft since 2014, and Sundar
Pichal, CEO at Google since 2015. The average Fortune ranking for the South Asians has
been 239, and the median ranking has been #242.
It is notable that of the 17 Asian-Americans who have become Fortune 500 CEOs since
2010, only 4 have been East Asian, and 11 have been South Asian. The trend clearly shows
that over time there have been fewer East Asian CEOs and more South Asian CEOs. This
led Jackson Lu, Richard Nisbet, and Michael Morris to write an article titled "Why East
Asians but not South Asians are underrepresented in leadership positions in the United
States." In nine empirical studies, using a variety of methods and samples, they looked
especially at three possible explanations for why this "bamboo ceiling" seemed to affect
East Asians much more than South Asians. They concluded that one of the three, low
assertiveness, but not the other two, prejudice against Asians, or the amount of motivation
that they had, was the key reason for this difference. "These results suggest," the authors
conclude, "that East Asians hit the bamboo ceiling because their low assertiveness is
incongruent with American norms concerning how leaders should communicate. The
bamboo ceiling is not an Asian issue, but an issue of cultural fit."
Three more who don't fit the categories of East Asians or South Asians
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. 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).
Muhtar Kent is a Turkish American born in New York City when his
father was the Turkish consul-general. 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. By 1985 he was the general manager of
Coca-Cola Turkey and Central Asia (living in Istanbul), by 1988 he
was the vice president of Coca-Cola International (living in Vienna),
and by 1995 he was general manager of Coca-Cola Amatil-Europe. He
left Coca-Cola to work in Turkey for six years, and then returned in
2005 where he was responsible for all of Coke's operations outside
[7]

Nazzic Keene
Dara Khosrowshahi
North America. In 2008 he became the company's CEO. 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.
Nazzic Keene took a much less traditional path to corporate power
than Muhtar Kent. She was born in 1962 in Tripoli, Libya, to a Libyan
father and a white American mother who had grown up in Tucson,
Arizona. When she was eight, Moammar Ghadaffi's Free Officers'
Movement overthrew the Libyan government in a coup d'etat. Her
father stayed in Libya, and her mother took Nazzic and her two sisters
back to Tucson. She helped her working mother raise her two younger
sisters, and then she attended the University of Arizona where she
majored in information technology in an emerging academic
department called the Department of Management Information
Systems. After putting herself through college, including work as a
bartender, she took a job with Electronic Data Systems Corporation. She worked there for
more than a decade, worked for Ernst and Young, and then was hired by American
Management Systems. After various positions, mergers, and acquisitions, she emerged as
the newly appointed CEO.
Dara Khosrowshahi, like Muhtar Kent, is part of a small (but
increasing) number of CEOs of Fortune 500 companies who grew up
in what can be considered the "global elite." 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. In 1978, just before the Iranian
Revolution, the family fled, first to France, and then to the USA. Like
Hayward Donigan, the white woman who became CEO of Rite Aid in
2020, he attended the elite Hackley School in Westchester County
outside of New York City (tuition in 2020: $44,000). 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). He became the CEO of Uber in 2017, a
company that first made the Fortune 500 list in 2020. In the months leading to the
November 2020 election, Uber successfully spent hundreds of millions of dollars to
convince voters to overturn a California law that would have required the company to
classify their drivers as employees instead of independent contractors. This initiative
may have a major impact in other states as part of the relentless and unremitting effort by
corporate America against unions, a battle that has been waged since the nineteenth
century.
[8]
[9]
[10]
[11]

Latinx CEOs
There have been 41 Latinx CEOs of Fortune 500 companies since 2000: 39 men and two
women. They differ from the white women and the African-American CEOs, but are similar
to the Asian-American CEOs, in that many were born outside the United States, and many
are bilingual or multilingual. Six were born in Spain, five in Cuba (three more were Cuban
Americans born in the USA), three in Argentina, three in Mexico, two in Venezuela, two in
Brazil, two in Puerto Rico; other countries of origin include Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica,
and Morocco. Most speak both Spanish and English, and some emphasize in their
biographical sketches that they speak more than two languages.
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. Their international origins, the fact that many have lived all over the world
heading up countries or regions for multinational corporations, their ability to speak more
than one language, and their general worldliness reminds us that the Fortune 500 are very
much a part of a global economy. As is the case when Fortune boards choose Asian CEOs,
when they choose Latinx CEOs they are likely to select men and women who have grown
up in the global elite.
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. Fifteen have
MBA degrees, four have PhD's (from Rice, UVA, Cal Tech, and the University of Valencia),
two have law degrees, and one has a medical degree.
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. Among the privileged are
those whose fathers founded the companies they now lead (for example, Joseph Molina was
the CEO of Molina Healthcare from 2012 through 2017 [#156 in 2017], a company his
father, a Mexican-American physician, had founded, and Jose Mas became the CEO of
Mastech in 2018 [#428], a company his Cuban-American father founded). Others had
fathers who were well-educated professionals, who owned businesses, or who were
executives in large companies. The father of Cristobal Conde, the CEO of Sungard Data
from 2002 to 2011 (#434), taught statistics at a university before the family had to flee Chile
because of the military coup that overthrew Allende. Bernardo Hess, the Brazilian-born
CEO of Kraft Heinz from 2015 through 2019 (#115), is the son of a father who was an
executive with Bechtel and a mother who was a teacher. When asked who the important
mentors have been in his life, Mauricio Gutierrez, who became the CEO of NRG in 2015
(#196 in 2015, #324 in 2020), said that he got the best advice from his father, who was the
CEO of a company in Mexico (the advice: first listen to others, but then be willing to make
a decision).

Geisha Williams
So, too, are there Latinx CEOs who appear to have had middle class backgrounds (their
parents were in the military, were teachers, were secretaries or accountants) and among the
Latino CEOs are some stories of dramatic journeys up the socioeconomic ladder. Carlos
Rodriguez, the CEO of Automatic Data Processing since 2011 (#275 in 2011, #227 in
2020), was born in Cuba, and came to the USA when he was young. His father, who had no
college degree, became a waiter, and his mother found work as a clerk at a trucking
company. 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).
Excluding those who were still in their positions in 2020, the other 24 Latino CEOs were in
their CEO jobs for an average of 5.7 years. The two longest-serving held their positions for
11 years: Paul Diaz, a Cuban-American lawyer who was the CEO of Kindred Health Care
from 2004 to 2015, and George Paz, a Mexican American accountant who became the CEO
of Express Scripts from 2005 to 2016. Six were CEOs of Fortune 100 companies, including
LaGarta, Nooyi's replacement at Pepsico, Enrique Lores, who became CEO at Hewlett
Packard (#55 — not to be confused with Hewlett Packard Enterprises, which was #109) in
2019, and Juan Luciano who became CEO at ADM in 2015 (#34 in 2015, #54 in 2020). The
average Fortune ranking for the Latinx CEOs was 268, and the median ranking was #250.
Latina women CEOs
There have been only two Latina Fortune 500 CEOs, neither of whom
was still in her CEO position in 2020. The first was Cuban-born
Geisha Williams, who became CEO at PG&E in March 2017 and held
that position until the end of 2018 (#157 in 2017, #168 in 2018). 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. Her name then was Geisha Jimenez — the name Geisha
came from a John Wayne movie that her parents liked, "The Barbarian
and the Geisha." Her father, a welder, worked in a factory by day,
washed dishes at night, and ultimately became part-owner of a
supermarket. She was the first in her family to earn a college degree — she received her BA
in industrial engineering from the University of Miami, and then an MBA from Nova
Southeastern. When she graduated, she went to work for Florida Power and Light, and
stayed with that company for 24 years. In 2007 she left to work at PG&E. Two weeks after
she resigned as CEO, the company declared bankruptcy. Subsequently released papers
revealed that despite the bankruptcy, and a $6.9 billion loss in revenue in 2018 (compared to
a profit of $1.7 the previous year), she received a salary increase of 8.3% "tied to corporate
performance," raising her salary for 2018 to $9.3 million.
The other Latina is Cheryl Miller, who became the CEO of Auto
Nation in July 2019 (#154). Born in Puerto Rico, her mother was
[12]
[13]

Cheryl Miller
Puerto Rican and her father was an Anglo from New York; like many
Latinas, and especially those with one Anglo parent, her appearance is
that of a white woman. The family moved to Baltimore when she was
young, and her father worked for the postal service. She went to James
Madison University, where she got a degree in finance and business
administration. She then worked for various companies in South
Florida, joining AutoNation in 2009, and becoming its chief financial
officer in 2014. In April 2020 she took a leave of absence for
undisclosed health reasons. On July 14, 2020, she announced that she
would not return as CEO, and resigned from the board as well. The
press release provided no information about her medical condition, and
through a spokesman she requested that the information remain confidential. Like Geisha
Williams, and like so many CEOs who leave their jobs for one reason or another, she was
given a nice parting gift, in her case a golden parachute of $5.4 million with the likelihood
of additional bonuses as part of her severance.
Just as it became clear that the distinction between East Asians and South Asians was
important as we looked at pathways to the CEO office, so, too, does it appear that the
umbrella term Latinx masks an important distinction. Those from the immigrant groups that
made up the Latinx population in the United States — those Mexican Americans, Cuban
Americans, Puerto Ricans, and those from other islands in the Caribbean — have had a very
different experience than those born into elites in other countries, the Spaniards and those of
Spanish descent who grew up wealthy in various South American countries (and, in terms
of growing up wealthy, we could include many who fled Cuba in this group). Many of the
Latinx Fortune 500 CEOs born outside the USA come from privilege, and therefore it is
important to keep in mind the key variable of socio-economic class (even though it is often
difficult to ascertain). If we take a closer look at those we consider part of the global elite,
and also factor in those born in the USA but whose parents were from ruling class families
in China or Cuba, then class background becomes even more apparent as a predictor of who
makes it to the top of the corporate world.
So, too, is skin color important, especially for Latinx. As we showed in an empirical study
that used the photographs of white, African-American, Asian-American, and Latinx CEOs,
published as an appendix in The New CEOs, Kyle Riplinger and I found that college
students rated the photos of the Latino Fortune 500 CEOs as much closer in skin color to
the whites than to the Asians or African-Americans. Moreover, they were by far less likely
to correctly identify the ethnicity of the Latinos than those in any of the other groups,
frequently misperceiving them as white. That is, just as many Latinx CEOs probably see
themselves as white, so, too, are they seen as white by others.
There has been considerable debate and disagreement among scholars and political activists
about what general name, if any, should be used to characterize a group whose main
common heritage is the Spanish conquest and the Spanish language. The term Hispanic has
been favored by some, especially on the East Coast; others prefer Latino, especially on the
West Coast. More recently, many have adopted the term "Latinx" to acknowledge that not
[14]
[15]

René Jones
all people fall under the gender binary of male and female. As Ramon Gutierrez explains in
an essay titled "What's in a Name? The History and Politics of Hispanic and Latino
Panethnicities," whatever term is used, the label emerged as part of a concerted push for
panethnicity, a process that brings together disparate people with shared experiences:
Immigrants and long-time residents hailing from such divergent places as Mexico, Puerto
Rico, and the Dominican Republic began celebrating their unity as "Latinos" in the 1970s,
just as persons from such distinct places as China, Japan, and Korea came to call
themselves "Asian-Americans" in the United States. As new panethnic groups, they
protested their marginalization and the toxic legacies of racism, militated for political
recognition, and petitioned the state for compensatory remedies, demonstrating not only
broader levels of interaction among their different national groups but also a heightened
sense of oppositional consciousness in relation to the state.
In a 2013 report by the Pew Research Center on Latino self-identification, however, it was
found that only 20 percent of those in a national survey called themselves "Hispanic" or
"Latino." The majority indicated that they thought of themselves as "Mexicans," "Puerto
Ricans," "Cubans," or whatever their country of family origin.
Conclusions: Whites and Third-Culture Kids
Fortune 500 CEOs: still white.
In June 2020, I spoke with a reporter for the Wall Street Journal who was writing an article
on the decline in the number of African-American CEOs in the Fortune 500 in recent years.
I told her that slightly more than a decade earlier there had been as many as seven, but there
were at that moment only four. 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. I had missed one: René Jones, the CEO of M&T
Bank (#462). When I looked for biographical information about him, I learned, as noted
above, that he is biracial, with an African-American father who was in the military, and a
Belgian mother. 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, René).
When I emailed the Wall Street Journal reporter to alert her to the error
I had made, I also noticed that at the end of the Fortune magazine
article there was a correction indicating that the author of that article
also had initially missed that René Jones is black ("Correction: This
story originally omitted the CEO of M&T Bank in its list of Black
CEOs"). 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. At the end of that article the correction read as follows:
"An earlier version of this article misstated the number of Black chief
executive officers in the Fortune 500. There were five, not four."
My point? Actually, there are a few things to consider, and perhaps learn from, when it
comes to this error that two journalists at prestigious publications and I made. One is that it
[16]
[17]
[18]
[19]

Enrique Salem
is hard to keep track of those we have called the New CEOs in part because the numbers are
ever-changing, and in part because there now have been so many that it is not big news.
When the first African-American Fortune 500 CEOs were appointed back in 1999, there
was considerable media coverage. However, when René Jones was appointed in 2017, the
18th African-American Fortune 500 CEO since 2000, it was not so newsworthy, and
therefore easier to miss.
Another consideration is that skin color may affect whether a person is
perceived as not white. Enrique Salem, a Latino who was born in
Colombia and was the CEO of Symantic from 2009 through 2012
(#391), told a reporter for Financial Times, "To be honest, most people
can't tell I'm Hispanic." Perhaps academics like me, various
journalists, and others simply have missed that René Jones is African-
American because he is so light-skinned.
The larger implication, however, has to do with the predominant
whiteness of Fortune 500 CEOs. The graph in Figure 1 indicates that
the number of white males has decreased from 96.4% in 2000 to 85.8%
in 2020. However, as I have noted, if we were to include the 34 white women Fortune 500
CEOs in 2020 with the white men, then 92.6% of the Fortune 500 CEOs are white. And, if
we add the men in our other categories who, like René Jones and Enrique Salem, appear to
be white even though they are people of color (and some of whom may consider themselves
to be white) — and some women of color, like Latina Cheryl Miller, whose father was a
white New Yorker, or Nazzic Keene, whose mother was a white woman from Tucson,
Arizona — then the percentage of white CEOs is even higher, and the percentage of CEOs
"of color" is even lower.
Third culture kids and flexible immigrants
Before the turn of the century, and therefore before the flow of new Fortune 500 CEOs
began, two social scientists put forth concepts that now may help us to predict future CEOs:
"third culture kids" and the "flexible immigrant."
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. Their multicultural and often multilingual upbringing provided
them with certain advantages, especially when it came to functioning effectively in differing
cultures.
Then, in a 1999 book, Aihwa Ong, an anthropology professor at Berkeley, proposed that
political upheavals and the emergence of global markets meant that transnationality is not
detrimental to the nation-state, but that it has provided those she called "flexible
immigrants" who could make valuable contributions. Fifteen years later, in a book about
the intense pressure applied by parents from privileged families to get their children into
elite colleges, Lois Weis, Kristin Cipollone, and Heather Jenkins, applied the concept of
[20]
[21]
[22]

flexible immigrants to elite boarding schools, arguing that international students from
wealthy backgrounds in their home countries might be outsiders in some ways, but
ultimately they fit into prep school culture because "they are fundamentally 'class insiders'"
(p. 201-202).
Now, looking at the patterns of the New CEOs over the last twenty years, it becomes clear
that some flexible immigrants and third culture kids, especially those born to wealth and
privilege in their home countries around the world, have emerged to lead multinational
Fortune-level corporations. They not only bring global understanding and typically the
ability to speak languages other than English, they are comfortable moving in elite circles in
any country. Perhaps even more important in terms of rising to the very top of U. S.
corporations, they share a class and educational background with the privileged white men
who sit on the boards of Fortune 500 companies who appoint them as CEOs. 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.
The concepts of third culture kids and flexible immigrants apply to many of the CEOs we
have described, including Muhtar Kent, who was born in New York City to a Turkish
ambassador, educated in England and then served in the Turkish military before his ascent
through Coca-Cola's corporate hierarchy. So, too, do these concepts apply to Dara
Khosrowshahi, whose wealthy family left Iran for France and then USA, who attended the
Hackley School and then Brown and Harvard, or Nazzic Keene, who spent her first five
years in Libya but then spent much of her childhood in Tucson, Arizona.
Most interestingly, these concepts also apply to Jide Zeitlin, who was born in Nigeria but
was adopted by an American family, spent three years of his childhood in Pakistan and then
five more in the Philippines, and then came with his new family to Cambridge,
Massachusetts, where he attended the prestigious Milton Academy, went to Amherst, and
did graduate work at Harvard. 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."
In September 2020, Citigroup announced that Jane Fraser, born in Scotland and educated at
Cambridge University in England before attending the Harvard Business School, was to
become their next CEO, starting in February 2021. The first woman to lead a big Wall Street
bank, she, too is a flexible immigrant (and she is married to a flexible immigrant and a third
culture kid, Alberto Piedra, Jr., a Cuban-born banker whose father left Havana in 1959 and
became the U. S. ambassador to Guatemala, so he spent some of his childhood in Havana,
some in Washington, D.C., and some in Guatemala). If we were to look beyond the
American-based companies in the Fortune 500, we would find even more flexible
immigrants. Tidjane Thiam, for example, born to an elite family in Sierra Leone (his father
was a journalist, a cabinet minister, and an ambassador), educated in Paris, and described by
the New York Times as "a tall, reserved, bespectacled polyglot" was from March 2015 until
[23]
[24]
[25]

Ajay Banga
February 2020 the CEO of Credit Suisse, "the only black executive in the top tier of
banking."
Ajay Banga has been the CEO at Mastercard since 2010. Born in India, he is the son of a
general in the Indian army who moved around a lot during Banga's childhood. In a
November 2020 interview in the New York Times, he describes what he considers the
benefits of these many moves, and shows that the very same advantages that can be
experienced by third culture kids and flexible immigrants can also occur for children whose
families move a lot within their own countries:
I grew up moving city to city. Adults find it hard to move, but kids don't.
In fact, moving frequently makes you flexible, quick to make friends,
quick to adjust and adapt, allows you to glide between cultures and
people. Because different parts of India are completely different
cultures. The North is completely different from the East and the West.
This is completely different than even in the South. The states are
different. Languages are different. Dresses are different. Movies are
different. The one thing it did for me more than anything else was this
easy adaptability, the willingness to adjust and the willingness to just fit
in, I think it's helped me in all my life.
Comparisons with the U. S. Senate and House
Another way to place these findings about the number of New CEOs from 2000 through
2020 in larger context is to compare these data with other, similar data. In our larger project,
in which we have looked at diversity in the power elite, we also have tracked diversity in the
political elite, and this has included especially the executive branch, but also both the Senate
and the House of Representatives. In Figures 4 and 5, below, I have graphed the percentages
of women and African-American CEOs, Senators, and members of the House of
Representatives (I have not done this for Latinos and Asian-Americans because so many of
the CEOs in those two categories have been foreign-born; they would, however, show
similar patterns). As can be seen in Figure 4, the gradual increase in the number of women
CEOs is less impressive when compared with the higher percentages of women in the
Senate and the House (neither of which has begun to approach gender equity).
[26]
[27]

Figure 4: Women CEOs, Women in the U.S. Senate, and Women in the U.S. House of
Representatives, 2000-2020
0%
5%
10%
15%
20%
25%
30%
2000
2001
2002
2003
2004
2005
2006
2007
2008
2009
2010
2011
2012
2013
2014
2015
2016
2017
2018
2019
2020
Women in
the Senate
Women in
the House
Women
CEOs
The comparison between African-American CEOs and members of Congress during this
same period, as seen in Figure 5, reminds us that in the Senate for the past two decades there
has been only one or two African-Americans (there were three in 2013, but one, Mo Cowan,
a Democrat from Massachusetts, was a temporary appointment for only five months, from
February 2013 through July 2013, and he was no longer in the Senate when Cory Booker
won a special election to replace Frank Lautenberg in October 2013). So, too, has the
number of African-American CEOs remained flat (between 2% and 3.5%). In the House,
however, where individuals are elected by the residents in the districts in which they live,
there has been a slow but steady climb, from slightly over 8% to 12%.

Figure 5: Black CEOs, Black members of the U.S. Senate, and Black members of the U.S.
House of Representatives, 2000-2020
0%
2%
4%
6%
8%
10%
12%
14%
2000
2001
2002
2003
2004
2005
2006
2007
2008
2009
2010
2011
2012
2013
2014
2015
2016
2017
2018
2019
2020
Black
members
of the
House
Black
members
of the
Senate
Black
CEOs
The November 2020 election did not lead to major changes in the patterns shown in Figures
4 and 5, though there was a marked increase in the number of Republican women elected to
the House of Representatives (from 13 to 23). Although as I write this not all of the final
counts are in, and eight races are still undecided, it appears that the number of women
whose terms will begin in January 2021 will increase in the House from 101 in 2019 to at
least 117 in 2021 (that is, from 23.2% to 27%) and in the Senate it will drop from 26 to 24.
There was an increase in the number of Blacks in the House, from 52 (or 12%) to at
least 56 (12.9%), with one more race involving a Black candidate still to be decided in
January. When Kamala Harris becomes Vice-President, the number of African Americans in
the Senate will drop from three to two. However, there will be a run-off election in Georgia
between Raphael Warnock, a Black man, and Kelly Loeffler, a white woman, so there will
be either one more woman or one more African-American in the Senate.
What about the pipeline?
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. The final
[28]

sample of twenty-five companies included such well-known names as Bank of America,
General Electric, MasterCard, Staples, Verizon, and Western Union.
This process produced a sample of 307 senior executives. Not quite one in five (18.8%)
were white women, 7.8% were Asians (mostly men), and 4.2% were Hispanic (mostly
men). For African-Americans, the flow through the pipeline was indeed minimal, with only
2.6% (seven males, one female).
Furthermore, just as we had found previously that the larger corporations were more likely
than smaller ones to have African-Americans on their boards of directors, so too did we
find that the largest companies were more likely to have black managers or executives at the
highest levels. For companies in the top 100 and for companies ranked between 101 and
200, 4% of the executives on the leadership teams were black; for the companies ranked 201
to 300, the percentage dropped to 2.1%; for the companies ranked 301 to 400, the
percentage dropped to 1.9%, and for the companies ranked 401 to 500 it dropped to 1.1%.
In order to update this earlier work on the pipeline, I once again turned to the photos of the
leadership teams of Fortune 500 companies. This time, I started by looking at the 22
companies in the top 25 that provided photos and biographical information. This yielded
information on 240 people at 22 corporations. 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. Again, this yielded information on 22 of these 25 companies, this
time for 200 people. The results can be seen in Table 2, below.
As can be seen, the percentages remain quite small. The biggest increase, not surprisingly,
was for white women, from 18.8% a decade or so ago to 23.2% in 2020, with a higher
percentage in the larger companies (27%) than in the smaller ones (19%). African-
Americans also showed a slight increase, from 2.6% to 3.2%, again with a higher
percentage in the large companies. Asian-Americans, however, showed a decrease, from
7.8% to 6.4% (more South Asians than East Asians — we did not code for that in 2011),
and Latinos showed a sharp drop from 4.2% to 1.4%.
Table 2: Potential "New CEOs" in the Pipeline, 2011 and 2020
2011
2020
(ALL)
2020
(#1-#25)
2020
(#251-#275)
White women 18.8% 23.2% 27.0% 19.0%
African-Americans 2.6% 3.2% 4.6% 1.5%
Asian-Americans 7.8% 6.4% 5.4% 7.5%
— East Asian (Chinese, Japanese, etc.) 2.3% 2.1% 2.5%
— South Asian (Indians, etc.) 4.1% 3.3% 5.0%
[29]
[30]
[31]
[32]

The pipeline, therefore, does not provide encouragement. The increases for white women
and African-Americans are quite small, and the decreases for Asian-Americans and Latinos
indicate that the executive ranks right below the CEO continue to be filled mostly with
white men.
And more: the glass cliff.
Neither the data in the twenty-year trends nor the data on who now is (or is not) in the
pipeline to the CEO office provide reason for optimism, Adding to this grim perspective,
some research indicates that women and men of color who ascend to CEO positions in the
Fortune 500 are faced with even greater uphill odds than their white male counterparts. In
2004, Michelle Ryan and Alexander Hasslam, two British academics, coined the term "glass
cliff" to refer to their findings that women who had been appointed as CEOs were more
likely than men to have taken over companies that had experienced especially poor
performances during the previous months. Since that time, many academics have explored
this phenomenon, with mixed results. In one of the most comprehensive studies of what
they call "glass cliff theory," Alison Cook and Christy Glass looked at all CEO transitions
over a 15-year period. 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. They concluded: "Minority leaders face challenges that
begin at the point of promotion and go beyond underrepresentation. Unlike white men, they
are more likely to be appointed to struggling firms, creating greater obstacles to successful
leadership than their white male peers." And why do they accept these especially
challenging jobs? Cook and Glass speculated that women and minorities are more likely to
accept positions leading troubled companies because they see it as their only chance. They
also found that when they were replaced, women and minority CEOs were especially likely
to be replaced by white males (which they call the "savior effect").
Cook and Glass found, as they expected, that the women and minorities in their sample had
shorter tenures than the white male CEOs, by about 4 months on average, but these
differences were not statistically significant. 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. They note
that only two of the women and minority CEOs in their sample, but 24 of the white men,
had been appointed in the previous year or so, and that this may have decreased the average
tenure for both groups, but especially that of the white men.
I decided to look at this issue for those New CEOs who were chief executives of Fortune
500 companies between 2000 and 2020, but I did not include those who were still in their
positions heading into 2021 (because their tenure was not over). I also did not include two
outliers, founders of their companies, who were CEOs for 33 and 24 years, far longer than
anyone else in the sample — Marion Sandler, co-founder of Golden West Financial, CEO
from 1973 to 2006, and Charles Wang, the founder of Computer Associates International,
from 1976 to 2000 (so he was CEO only for one year in the time frame I used).
[33]

As can be seen in Table 3, for the 42 white women who had been CEOs and stepped down
by the end of 2020, the average tenure was 6.0 years. 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.
Table 3: Mean tenure of "New CEOs"
Average tenure
in years Average tenure in years,
excluding interim CEOs
All Fortune 500 CEOs (n=500) 6.9
White women CEOs (n=42) 6.0 6.1 (1 interim excluded)
African-American CEOs (n=16) 4.8 5.4 (2 interims excluded)
East Asian CEOs (n=8) 6.4
South Asian CEOs (n=14) 7.1
Latinx CEOs (n=24) 5.7 5.9 (1 interim excluded)
All "New CEOs" (n=104) 5.95 6.1 (4 interims excluded)
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. These data
appear to provide additional support for the glass cliff theory: with the exception of the
South Asians, the New CEOs, and especially the women and African-American CEOs, do
not last as long in office as white male CEOs, and this may be a result of taking the
leadership role in companies with bigger problems than those led by white males. 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.
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.
Follow-up studies they performed indicated that evaluators perceived East Asian CEOs as
more likely than white men to be self-sacrificing and believed that they were more likely to
be effective in periods of decline than periods of success. Therefore, they assert, East
Asians, like women, face the challenge of a glass cliff, but for different reasons: whereas
women are perceived as more likely to be warm, more effective in managing people and in
defusing conflict, East Asians are perceived as more likely to be self-sacrificing, and, as a
result, more likely to promote within-group harmony and cooperation. Their findings,
coupled with the findings discussed above by Lu, Nisbet, and Morris, help to explain the
underlying reasons for an ongoing bamboo ceiling for East Asians.
[34]
[35]
[36]

Based then on the appointments of New CEOs from 2000 through 2020, based on the very
small number of New CEOs in the pipeline leading to the CEO office, and based on the
academic research that suggests that those New CEOs who are appointed face more
daunting challenges than their white male counterparts, and that they have shorter tenures as
CEOs than do their white male counterparts, I can only conclude that the future does not
look bright when it comes to diversity among Fortune 500 CEOs. 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.
Footnotes
[1] Dennis Gilbert. 2015. The American Class Structure in an Age of Growing Inequality,
9th Edition. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
[2] The information in this paragraph is from emails received from Arnold Zeitlin on July
12, 2020. For information on distinctive Jewish names, see Richard L. Zweigenhaft and G.
William Domhoff (2018), Diversity in the Power Elite, Ironies and Unfulfilled Promises
(3rd Edition), Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, pp. 23-24 and 233.
[3] Jide Zeitlin's letter posted on LinkedIn can be seen here: https://www.linkedin.com/
pulse/my-story-jide-zeitlin/. See also: Sapna Maheshwari, 2020, "Tapestry CEO resigns,
acknowledging past relationship," New York Times, July 21 (https://www.nytimes.com/
2020/07/21/business/tapestry-jide-zeitlin-resigns.html); and William Cohan, 2020, "The
bizarre fall of the CEO of Coach and Kate Spade's Parent Company," Pro Publica, July 22
(https://www.propublica.org/article/the-bizarre-fall-of-the-ceo-of-coach-and-kate-spades-
parent-company)
[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).
[5] Yen Le Espiritu. 1992. Asian American Panethnicity, Philadelphia: Temple University
Press.
[6] Richard L. Zweigenhaft and G. William Domhoff. 2014. The New CEOs: Women,
African American, Latino, ad Asian American Leaders of Fortune 600 Companies. Lanham,
MD: Rowman & Littlefield, p. 68.
[7] Jackson G. Lu, Richard E. Nisbet, and Michael W. Morris. 2020. Why East Asians but
not South Asians are underrepresented in leadership positions in the United States.
Proceedings of the National Academy of the Sciences, PNAS March 3, 117 (9) 4590-4600;
first published February 18, 2020; https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1918896117
[8] The British Raj, or the rule by the British Crown that lasted from 1858 to 1947, often
called British India, included what is now considered India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and
Burma.

[9] Carten Cordell. 2019. "Nazzic Keene will soon lead the massive contractor she helped
create," Washington Business Journal, June 28; https://www.bizjournals.com/washington/
news/2019/06/28/nazzic-keene-will-soon-lead-the-massive-contractor.html
[10] Kari Paul and Julia Carrie Wong, 2020, "California Passes Prop 22 in a Major Victory
for Uber and Lyft," The Guardian, November 4; https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/
2020/nov/04/california-election-voters-prop-22-uber-lyft
[11] Richard L. Zweigenhaft and G. William Domhoff. 2014. The New CEOs: Women,
African American, Latino, and Asian American Leaders of Fortune 500 Companies
(Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield), pp. 9-10; and G. William Domhoff, 2020, The
Corporate Rich and the Power Elite in the Twentieth Century: How They Won, Why
Liberals and Labor Lost (New York: Routledge), Chapters 1-5.
[12] At least one person claims that Ursula Burns should count as a Latina because her
mother was Panamanian. See Raquel Reichard. 2019. "The Fortune 500 Just Lost its Second
Latina CEO," Fierce Boss Ladies, January 16; https://fierce.wearemitu.com/fierce-boss-
ladies/fortune-500-lost-second-latina-ceo-geisha-williams/
[13] Michael Hiltzik. 2019. "Ex-CEO Geisha Williams steered PG&E into bankruptcy, but
still got a big raise," Los Angeles Times, April 29; https://www.latimes.com/business/hiltzik/
la-fi-hiltzik-pge-ceo-raise-20190429-story.html. Even with this hefty compensation
package, Williams was paid much less than many other CEOs. In 2019, the compensation of
the CEOs at the top 350 firms averaged $21.3 million, an increase of 14% from 2018. The
CEO-to-regular-worker ratio increased from 293-1 to 320-1 (it was 21 to 1 in 1965, and 61-
to-1 in 1989. See Lawrence Mishel and Jori Kandra, 2020. "CEO compensation surged 14%
in 2019 to $21.3 million," Economic Policy Institute, August 18; https://epi.org/204513
[14] Matthew Arrojas. 2020. "AutoNation to pay millions in 'golden parachute' severance to
former CEO," South Florida Business Journal, July 16; https://www.bizjournals.com/
bizwomen/news/latest-news/2020/07/inside-cheryl-miller-s-golden-parachute-
package.html?page=all
[15] Zweigenhaft and Domhoff, 2014, The New CEOs, pp. 62-63. See also: Richard L.
Zweigenhaft and Kyle Riplinger. 2014. Baby-Faced and More: CEOs and Skin Color; and
Appendix 2 in Zweigenhaft and Domhoff, 2014, The New CEOs, pp. 165-176.
[16] Ramon A. Gutierrez. 2016, "What's in a Name? The History and Politics of Hispanic
and Latino Panethnicities," in The New Latino Studies Reader: A Twenty-first Century
Perspective, ed. Ramon A. Gutierrez and Tomas Almaguer (Oakland: University of
California Press), 20-21.
[17] Rodolfo de la Garza, Louis De Sipio, F. Chris Garcia, John Garcia, and Angelo Falcon.
1992. Latino Voices: Mexican, Puerto Rican, and Cuban Perspectives on American Politics
(Boulder, CO: Westview), 13-14. See also Suzanne Oboler, 1995, Ethnic Labels, Latino
Lives (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press); Renee Stepler and Anna Brown, 2016,
Statistical Portrait of Hispanics in the United States, Pew Research Center, April 19; and G.

Christina Mora, 2014, Making Hispanics: How Activists, Bureaucrats, and Media
Constructed a New American (Chicago: University of Chicago Press).
[18] Phil Wahba. 2020. "The number of black CEOs in the Fortune 500 remains very low,"
Fortune, June 1; https://fortune.com/2020/06/01/black-ceos-fortune-500-2020-african-
american-business-leaders/
[19] Sapna Maheshwari. 2020. "Tapestry C.E.O. resigns, acknowledging past relationship,"
New York Times, July 21; https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/21/business/tapestry-jide-
zeitlin-resigns.html
[20] Emma Jacobs. 2010. 20 Questions: Enrique Salem. Financial Times, April 15.
[21] See, for example, Ruth Hill Useem, 1966, "The American Family in India," The Annals
of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 368 (1), 132-145; https://doi.org/
10.1177/000271626636800113. And: Ruth Hill Useem and Richard D. Downie. 1976.
Third-culture kids. Today's Education 65.3: 103-105.
[22] Aihwa Ong. 1999. Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logic of Transnationality,
Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
[23] Lois Weis, Kristin Cippoloni and Heather Jenkins. 2014. Class Warfare: Class, Race,
and College Admissions in Top-Tier Secondary Schools, Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, pp. 201-202.
[24] Richard Zweigenhaft. 2016. "The rise and fall of diversity at the top: The appointments
of Fortune 500 CEOs from 2005 through 2015," Who Rules America? website.
https://whorulesamerica.ucsc.edu/power/rise_and_fall_of_diversity.html
[25] Emily Flitter and Anupreeta Das. 2020. "Citigroup's Fraser to Be the First Woman to
Lead a Big Wall Street Bank," New York Times, September 10; https://www.nytimes.com/
2020/09/10/business/citigroup-ceo-jane-fraser.html
[26] Kate Kelly. 2020. "The Short Tenure and Abrupt Ouster of Banking's Sole Black
C.E.O.," New York Times, October 3; https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/03/business/
tidjane-thiam-credit-suisse.html
[27] David Gelles, 2020, "Corner Office: The CEO Who Promised There Would Be No
Layoffs," New York Times, November 6; https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/06/business/
corner-office-ajay-banga-mastercard.html
[28] Sharon Austin, 2020, "A Record Number of women will serve in the 11th Congress,
including at least 51 women of color," The Conversation, November 17.
[29] See Zweigenhaft and Domhoff. 2014. The New CEOs, p. 200 for the list of the 25
companies.
[30] Richard L. Zweigenhaft and G. William Domhoff. 2006. Diversity in the Power Elite:
How it Happened, Why it Matters. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, pp. 100-101.
[31] Zweigenhaft and Domhoff. 2014. The New CEOs, p. 137.

[32] These data are quite similar to those found in a Stanford Business School study of
diversity in the C-Suites of Fortune 100 companies. See David F. Larcker and Brian Tayan
(2020), "Diversity in the C-Suite: The Dismal State of Diversity Among Fortune 100 Senior
Executives" (April 1). Rock Center for Corporate Governance at Stanford University Closer
Look Series: Topics, Issues and Controversies in Corporate Governance No. CGRP-82,
Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3587498
[33] Alison Cook and Christy Glass. 2014. "Above the glass ceiling: When are women and
racial/ethnic minorities promoted to CEO?" Strategic Management Journal, 35 (7), 1080-
1089; https://doi.org/10.1002/smj.2161
[34] Scott DeCarlo and Anne Vandermey. 2015. "The 14 longest-serving CEOs of the
Fortune 500, Fortune, May 5; https://fortune.com/2015/05/05/14-longest-serving-ceos/
[35] Are these differences statistically significant? A one-sample t-test comparing the
average tenure for the 104 New CEOs (5.95 years) with the average tenure of the Fortune
500 CEOs in 2015 (6.90 years) reveals that the difference is statistically significant (t=2.17,
df=103, p<.03). If I not only omit the two outliers but also omit the four New CEOs whose
appointments were interim (one white woman, two African Americans and a Latino), each
of whom served for only for one or two years, the difference approaches but is not
significant (t=1.73, df=99, p<.08).
[36] Seval Gündemir, Andrew M. Carton, and Astrid C. Homan. 2019. The impact of
organizational performance on the emergence of Asian American leaders. Journal of
Applied Psychology. 2019, 104 (1), 107-122; https://doi.org/10.1037/apl0000347.