Chris Womack grew up in the segregated South with whites-only restrooms and water fountains. After school, he caught fish and picked collard greens for dinner. On Sundays, he went to church with his mother and grandmother, who taught him that education and hard work could unlock doors that racism slammed shut.
Womack unlocked one of those doors in 2021 when he became the first Black CEO of Georgia Power, the largest subsidiary of Southern Company.
Southern Company announced in January that he would take charge of the whole organization later this year during the utility holding company’s annual meeting.
The appointment will make him one of four Black CEOs in the S&P 100, the nation’s 100 top publicly traded companies.
White men still run corporate America, but Black leaders like Womack are making headway, according to a USA TODAY analysis of named executive officers at S&P 100 companies.
Lynsey Weatherspoon for USA TODAY
These corporate leaders, who are listed on federal regulatory forms, include CEOs, chief financial officers and others who serve in a handful of top-paid roles.
Of the 533 named executive officers across these corporations, white men represent 7 in 10. And of those companies, about 1 in 7 had executive teams that were made up of only white men in 2022.
Meanwhile, women – just 90 of them – make up 17% of named executive officers. Only 17 women of color were named executive officers in 2022.
In fact, white men today are even more likely than their grandfathers to be managers despite a diversifying workforce and evidence from research studies that diverse companies outperform peers that are not, says Alexandra Kalev, an associate professor of sociology and anthropology at Tel Aviv University.
The greatest progress made in the S&P 100 was among Black men, USA TODAY found.
Fourteen Black men were named executive officers in 2020, the year George Floyd’s murder forced the nation to confront systemic racism. Two years later, 19 of them were, an increase of more than one-third.
Two of those top executives were recently tapped to lead large energy producers: Womack of Southern Company and Calvin Butler Jr. of Exelon.
Womack, who attributes much of his early success to the women who raised him, says he has experienced how others react when they learn their potential could be limitless, too.
But most big businesses that pledged to add diverse talent and put more money into racial equity have not put in the work necessary to reverse high turnover rates and low promotion rates for people of color, Womack said.
“I think a bunch of companies engaged in PR campaigns and really did not do a lot of deep foundational and fundamental work,” he said. “We have the opportunity now to really make changes, to really make a difference, to really make advancement on issues of race and on issues of equity. And I don’t want us to miss this opportunity.”
Jasper Colt, USA TODAY
Exelon’s Butler, who was born and raised in St. Louis, a short distance from Ferguson, where a white police officer killed unarmed Black teenager Michael Brown in 2014, was the first in his family to attend college.
His late father used to work swing shifts at a power station. Now Butler oversees a vast network of them.
For him, diversity is not a “side job” separate from the core business. It is the job.
When he took over Exelon subsidiary Baltimore Gas and Electric in 2014, he was the only person of color on the leadership team.
Butler says that when he left five years later in 2019 to lead Exelon Utilities, Baltimore Gas and Electric had the most diverse leadership team of any of Exelon’s utilities and delivered its highest customer satisfaction rating and best financial performance to date.
Making sure company leadership reflects the millions of customers it serves from Wilmington, Delaware, to Philadelphia is a priority he does not plan on delegating to his company’s diversity chief.
“He doesn’t own it,” Butler told USA TODAY. “I own it.”
Though corporate leadership has always been an exclusive club, it has gotten more exclusive in the past two generations.
Starting in the 1950s, a wave of court decisions and federal laws created new opportunities for white women and people of color.
By the 1980s, the influence of the women’s and civil rights movements waned in the workplace, as did interest in equal opportunity and affirmative action, says Donald Tomaskovic-Devey, a sociology professor who runs the Center for Employment Equity at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.
When he ran Aetna, Ron Williams used to take members of his team to an annual golf and tennis gathering sponsored by Black Enterprise magazine, where they were among the few non-Black executives mingling with several hundred Black executives.
His executives came away with a better understanding of what the workplace is like when you are in “the dramatic minority,” said Williams, one of less than two dozen Black CEOs in the history of the Fortune 500 list.
When named executive officers are all white or all men, companies are not taking diversity seriously, Williams said.
“If they performed in a similar way in achieving their revenue goals, in achieving their earnings goals, in achieving their product innovation goals, they would be unemployed, period.”
Some differences remain in education, experience and skill levels, but those differences do not explain why white women and people of color with the same qualifications are not landing leadership positions in equal numbers, according to Kalev, who studies organizations, work and inequality.
“All this talk about diversity, equality and inclusion,” she said. “Where is the diversity?”
Despite their growing numbers and high levels of ambition, women of color face a long road to parity.
Black women like Rashida La Lande are just 1% of named executive officers.
Years ago as a young lawyer on a partnership track, La Lande arrived early for a meeting only to be directed to the secretarial pool.
She cried in the bathroom, but instead of giving up, she psyched herself up with the opening scene from Eminem’s “8 Mile.” “The moment,” she told herself, “you own it.”
“I dusted myself off, wiped off the makeup, put it back on and went back into the room,” said La Lande, who grew up in Jamaica, Queens, before graduating from Harvard and then Columbia University for law school. “I absolutely killed it.”
Now she opens doors for others as executive vice president, global general counsel, and chief sustainability and government affairs officer for The Kraft Heinz Co. She has learned to make it clear from the very beginning of meetings who she is and why attendees need to treat her with respect.
“I am bringing to the table a certain skill set, capabilities, judgment, excellence and hard work, and I am going to let those things do the speaking for me,” she said.
Asian women belong to a similarly tiny minority. They comprised 1.1% of named executive officers in 2020 and 1.7% in 2022.
Late one evening in 2006, drugmaker Bristol Myers Squibb dismissed its general counsel. A board member called Sandra Leung to ask her to fill in on a temporary basis.
She says she did not match the profile of previous general counsels, who were Ivy League-educated white men who had been partners in major law firms. Five months later, the board dropped “interim” from her title.
“They knew me and knew what I could bring to the table,” said Leung, executive vice president and general counsel of the company and the daughter of Chinese immigrants.
“Companies need to challenge themselves on what it really takes to be successful in a role,” she said. “I really think sometimes there is a weak correlation between being successful in a role and some of the criteria people set out. And if you keep using that same playbook, you automatically are going to have a more homogeneous group.”
If Prabha Parameswaran has learned anything in 27 years working on five continents for Colgate-Palmolive, it’s that diversity is essential for a global consumer products business that depends on understanding and anticipating customer needs in so many places.
“The more women you have at senior levels, the more women of color that you have at senior levels, it just helps the younger talent coming up the pipeline to dare to dream,” said Parameswaran, group president of growth and strategy at the company.
The gap was widest for Hispanic women and Latinas of any gender or racial group reviewed by USA TODAY. They comprised just 0.4% of named executive officers and were underrepresented by eighteenfold when compared with their share of the workforce.
In the S&P 100, white men were nine times as likely as a Latina to be a named executive officer.
Sandra Rivera is one of Intel’s top executives and leads its data center business and AI strategy.
Martin Klimek for USA TODAY
Rivera, whose parents immigrated from Colombia with $100 in their pockets and 100 English words in their vocabulary to build a better life, says she had to work twice as hard for half the recognition.
The lone woman or person of color in nearly every business situation, Rivera figured out early in her career as a sales engineer that she would be remembered for it.
“So I was always the most prepared in terms of understanding my product, the technology, the industry, the competitive landscape and really listening intently to understand the customer problems we were solving,” she said. “When the expectation is so low based on both conscious and unconscious biases, walking in and then actually exceeding expectations, that was the thing I learned to do.”
Maria Martinez has worked at a who’s who of tech companies from Microsoft to Salesforce since leaving Puerto Rico after graduating from college in 1980. She took her first engineering job at AT&T and Bell Labs while earning a master’s degree in computer engineering from Ohio State University.
At Bell Labs, she was the only woman and Latina in the room filled with male engineers in shirt sleeves and pocket protectors.
Not as much has changed as she’d like. As Cisco’s chief operating officer, Martinez says, she has more influence because she does not have to downplay or hide her identity. But that still isn’t the case for most.
“It always puzzles me why we don’t have more Latinas in positions of power,” Martinez said. “Clearly it has to do with the fact that we don’t spend a lot of time making sure that we support their growth.”
At the current rate, how long will it take for the executive suite to mirror the nation’s workforce, let alone its population?
Angeles Valenciano, CEO of the National Diversity Council, a nonprofit that advocates workforce diversity, fears it may be a matter of decades, if not centuries.
She’s right, according to Kalev and Harvard sociologist Frank Dobbin’s recent book “Getting to Diversity: What Works and What Doesn’t,” which examined 45 years of workforce data at 800 companies.
They found that Asian American men and women are making headway, but not as much as they might given their education levels.
In 1995, 10% of Asian American men were managers, the researchers found. Today, 15% are. Over that same period, Asian women went from 5% to 9%.
Progress for white women is halting at best. In 2000, 10% were managers. In 2018, they inched up to 11%. It will take a century for them to catch up with white men. The same goes for Hispanic women and Latinas.
If nothing changes, Black women will catch up with white men in two centuries. And Black men and Latinos may never catch up.
“This is something we will not see in our lifetime if we continue at the pace we’re at now,” Valenciano said. “Unless we make bigger pushes toward this, we may never get there.”