A new low for the Global 500: No women of color run businesses on this year’s list
This is the web version of The Broadsheet, a daily newsletter for and about the world’s most powerful women. Sign up to get it delivered free to your inbox.
Good morning, Broadsheet readers! Uber shares guidance for appropriate driver-passenger conversation, Oprah Winfrey continues advocating for Breonna Taylor, and there are no women of color who run businesses on this year’s Global 500. Make the most of your Monday.
– Global view. The Fortune Global 500 today hit a new low. For the first time in several years, all of the women who run Global 500 companies are white.
The 2020 Global 500 list is out this morning, and women run just 13 of the 500 companies that made the cut. Thirteen is one fewer than last year, and two of the companies to drop off the list happen to be the ones run by women of color. Flex, the manufacturing and supply chain logistics company led by CEO Revathi Advaithi, didn’t meet the list’s $25.4 billion revenue cutoff. Pertamina, the Indonesian state-owned oil and gas company led by president director Nicke Widyawati, did not report 2019 fiscal-year results by the list’s close, excluding the business from this year’s tally.
Fortune‘s data on female Global 500 CEOs goes back to 2014, and in the past six years there has never been a Global 500 in which zero women of color ran businesses on the list. (Past women among this group include former PepsiCO CEO Indra Nooyi, former chairman and managing director of Hindustan Petroleum Nishi Vasudeva, and former State Bank of India chairman Arundhati Bhattacharya.)
The list of female Fortune 500 CEOs is hardly a diverse one—there are no Black women running Fortune 500 businesses and only three women of color do so—but this year’s Global 500 is decidedly worse for diversity, especially when you consider that the Global 500 represents businesses in every country around the world. (The Global 500 ranks companies by size across the global economy, compared to the Fortune 500’s U.S. focus.)
On this year’s list, Mary Barra’s GM is the highest-ranking woman-led company (as a multinational corporation, GM appears on both the Fortune 500 and the Global 500). There are other Fortune 500 repeats: Anthem CEO Gail Boudreaux, UPS CEO Carol Tomé, Best Buy CEO Corie Barry, Oracle CEO Safra Catz, General Dynamics CEO Phebe Novakovic, Progressive CEO Tricia Griffith, and Northrop Grumman CEO Kathy Warden.
The other five names come from companies headquartered outside the U.S. Accenture is incorporated in Ireland, putting CEO Julie Sweet on the Global 500 list. Amanda Blanc was named CEO of the U.K. insurer Aviva in July. Claire Waysand is interim CEO of the French electric utility Engie; she succeeded Isabelle Kocher, who was ousted from the role in February. Martina Merz runs the German industrial engineering conglomerate Thyssenkrupp. And Emma Walmsley is still at the helm of British pharma giant GlaxoSmithKline, leading the business through the coronavirus vaccine race.
These 13 women lead just 2.6% of Global 500 businesses.
The Global 500—like the Fortune 500—is not a scientific assessment of where women stand in the global economy, but it does provide a moment-in-time insight into who is running the world’s biggest businesses. This year, it’s not women of color.
See the full Global 500 here.
Emma Hinchliffe
emma.hinchliffe@fortune.com
@_emmahinchliffe