How many ceos in america

Another example: In October , J. Penney appointed Jill Soltau to replace Marvin Ellison, who failed to turn around the struggling retailer. What's more: When a company is doing poorly, the rate of firing between men and women is equal, with no statistically significant difference.

But when a company is doing well, women are fired at a much faster rate. The theory of those academic researchers is that when a company is struggling, the decision to fire a CEO is obvious. Born: May 28, , Houston, TX. Born: March 30, , Chicago, IL. Born: Oct. Company: Alcoa Inc. There are currently no black majority owned company in the Fortune rankings.

Marvin Ellison. Roger W. Ferguson, Jr. Rosalind G. Thasunda Brown Duckett. 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 s 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 companies between and 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. 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. 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. 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. Born in Madras in , 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" , [6] 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 The other South Asian woman who has been a Fortune CEO, Sonia Syngal, was born in India in , 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.

The average Fortune ranking for the South Asians has been , and the median ranking has been 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. The bamboo ceiling is not an Asian issue, but an issue of cultural fit.

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. He did his undergraduate work, and a master's degree, in England, served in the Turkish military, and in came to the United States where he lived with an uncle and went to work for Coca-Cola. He left Coca-Cola to work in Turkey for six years, and then returned in where he was responsible for all of Coke's operations outside North America.

In 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 in Tripoli, Libya, to a Libyan father and a white American mother who had grown up in Tucson, Arizona.

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 companies who grew up in what can be considered the "global elite.

In the months leading to the November 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.

Most speak both Spanish and English, and some emphasize in their biographical sketches that they speak more than two languages. 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 are very much a part of a global economy.

Among the privileged are those whose fathers founded the companies they now lead for example, Joseph Molina was the CEO of Molina Healthcare from through [ in ], a company his father, a Mexican-American physician, had founded, and Jose Mas became the CEO of Mastech in [ ], 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 to , 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 through , 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 in , in , 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.

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. 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. 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.

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. Two weeks after she resigned as CEO, the company declared bankruptcy.

Born in Puerto Rico, her mother was 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 , and becoming its chief financial officer in In April she took a leave of absence for undisclosed health reasons.

On July 14, , 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. 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 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. 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. Single Account. The ideal entry-level account for individual users. Corporate solution including all features. Statistics on " Minorities in Media in the U.

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