Since its debut in 1955, only 25 companies on Fortune’s annual list of the 500 largest U.S. businesses by revenue were led by Black CEOs at the time of their ranking, according to the magazine’s website. This year’s list had the highest number of Black CEOs on it at any given time in American history. That number was eight: Brewer, Duckett, and six Black men.
“The recent ousting of Brewer confirms our research findings that women of color face higher expectations when it comes to performance and steeper cliffs when analysts and the media judge their missteps,” notes Alexis Smith Washington, who holds the William S. Spears Chair in Oklahoma State University’s business school. “Much of success in these roles relies on maintaining the trust of these stakeholders; Black women are too often seen as risky bets by those who make the calls on leaders. There is simply less room for error when Black women are at the helm.”
Walgreens says it is going in a different direction, focusing more on the healthcare side of their business. “Our Board and leadership team will intensify our focus on creating value for our customers and our shareholders while we advance the search for a successor with deep healthcare experience to lead in today’s dynamic environment,” the company’s executive chairman Stefano Pessina said in WBA’s online announcement about Brewer’s departure. Before her 30-month Walgreens stint, Brewer amassed an impressive career in retail leadership roles at Starbucks, Walmart, and Kimberly-Clark.
CNBC reports that Walgreens shares are down more than 32% this year, which is partly attributable to declines in customer demands for COVID tests and vaccines. Also, the company’s third-quarter earnings fell short of Wall Street analysts’ expectations this past June for the first time in three years. Presumably, WBA believes the answer is doing more of what its biggest competitor CVS has done in recent years: acquire healthcare companies and open new clinics within or nearby its retail stores.
Is this direction shift all of a sudden? Was it not part of WBA’s long-term strategy when Brewer was chosen as the company’s chief executive? A significant portion of her tenure was spent leading WBA through the pandemic, most intensively after vaccine shots became widely available in stores. Was Brewer afforded sufficient time and opportunity to catch Walgreens up to CVS’s running start in the healthcare delivery space?
Executives of color in business are often given less time than are their white counterparts to turn struggling organizations around – this happens to Black head football coaches, too, as I have previously documented. The intersectionality of race and gender makes women of color particularly susceptible to penalties associated with being expected to deliver unreasonably high results in too little time. Their leadership is also negatively impacted by the glass cliff – a phenomenon that describes the appointment of women to top leadership roles in which they’re unlikely to succeed because too much of their time is spent cleaning up enormous messes made before they arrived. In Brewer’s case, the mess was COVID. Notwithstanding, on many metrics, she succeeded as Walgreens’ CEO.
And then there’s the ‘damned if you do, damned if you don’t’ predicament – also known as the double bind – that disproportionately affects women. Being perceivably too ambitious by some and not ambitious enough by others is one example of a double bind. In Brewer’s case, it seems that perhaps she was too retail for a company that has approximately 9,000 retail stores across America, but not healthcare enough.
“Black women continue to face a number of unique challenges at the upper echelons of organizations, including experiences with both race- and gender-based discrimination, bias, harassment, and stereotypes” says Marla Baskerville, a professor in the Northeastern University D’Amore-McKim School of Business. “Black women are also typically tokens as they are the only one – or one of a few – at senior levels. Being numerically underrepresented cannot only be extremely isolating for Black women, but it can also heighten their visibility, in which they, and their performance are heavily and often unfairly scrutinized.”
Under the guise of objectivity, one could argue that WBA’s numbers under Brewer’s leadership weren’t strong. Therefore, her departure is objectively about business, entirely about the bottom line. Such interpretation is shortsighted. It fails to acknowledge what was accomplished and under what extraordinarily difficult circumstances during Brewer’s tenure. It also dismisses other explanatory factors for the chronic underrepresentation of Black women CEOs; it devalues and erases what they bring to executive leadership positions; it makes ascension to and success in CEO roles seemingly impossible for other women of color; and it denies future companies who will foolishly doubt the readiness of Black women the opportunities to profit significantly from their talents.
Given how few Black women have been chosen to lead top businesses, it’s necessary to honor and applaud what Brewer and Ursula Burns (who served as CEO of Xerox from 2009 to 2016) accomplished while they were at the helm of their respective Fortune 500 companies. Diana Bilimoria, KeyBank Professor in the Weatherhead School of Management at Case Western Reserve University, adds, “Partnering with a Black woman CEO is even more important for corporate boards, especially in setting corporate direction and strategy, prioritizing key benchmarks and success drivers, serving as a sounding board particularly during times of crisis or decline, and engaging in open communication.” In the future, any board that selects a talented Black woman as its CEO must commit itself to ensuring her success in these and other ways.
