Will Roz Brewer's Appointment As Walgreens CEO Encourage More C-Suite Diversity?

When Walgreens Boots Alliance Inc. WBA announced the appointment of Rosalind (Roz) Brewer as the company’s new CEO last week, there was no mention of her gender or race until eight paragraphs into the press release, when the company she “made history by becoming the first woman and first African American to lead a Walmart Inc WMT division.”

What Happened: Walgreens’ press announcement did not emphasize Brewer’s unique position in the corporate world as being the sole Black woman to hold the CEO title within a Fortune 500 and being only the third Black woman to ever achieve this position.

Ursula Burns broke the barrier as CEO of Xerox Holdings Corp XRX from 2009 to 2016, while Mary Winston served as interim CEO at Bed Bath & Beyond Inc. BBBY for six months during 2019.

Brewer is no stranger to the C-suite: she was previously chief operating officer, group president and board member at Starbucks Corp. SBUX, and before that was president and CEO of Walmart’s members-only warehouse channel Sam’s Club. 

Related Link: Walgreens Investors Are Loving Their New Starbucks And Sam's Club-Bred CEO

Why It Matters: When she begins her new job, Brewer will become only one of 40 women and one of four African Americans running a Fortune 500 company.

On a few occasions, Brewer has publicly articulated the challenges she has faced in being in a professional class by herself, most notably in a 2018 speech before her alma mater Spelman College, an all-women historically black institution, when she recalled how a member of a CEO roundtable she attended mistook her for being a marketing or merchandising officer rather than a chief executive.

“You get mistaken as someone who could actually not have that top job,” she recalled. “Sometimes you’re mistaken for kitchen help. Sometimes people assume you’re in the wrong place, and all I can think in the back of my head is, ‘no, you’re in the wrong place.’”

Although media coverage of her appointment has heavily emphasized her gender and race, Brewer has yet to make any public comments on the historic aspects of her new job.

In the Walgreens press announcement, she did not call attention to herself but instead highlighted the COVID-19 pandemic and the evolving nature of health care with a promise to “deliver further innovation and positively impact the lives of millions of people around the world every day.”

What’s Next: While several prominent publicly traded companies have been adding the position of a chief diversity officer to ensure a greater degree of inclusion within their workforces, the very low percentage of women and African Americans in the higher level of corporate leadership remains an obvious imbalance.

Nor does it seem that rapid change will be coming anytime soon: A 2018 PwC survey of corporate directors found 52% of respondents dismissing diversity efforts as being an act of political correctness and 48% insisting shareholders were too obsessed with the subject.

And while the #MeToo movement and the public protests against systemic racism following the death of George Floyd have sparked increased conversations on addressing gender and racial inequalities, there has been no great rush to diversify the CEO ranks within the nation’s largest corporations.

Nonetheless, Brewer’s new job has been greeted positively. Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority Inc., the historically Black sorority that Brewer joined during her Spelman years, was optimistic that Brewer’s appointment was not an anomaly.

“Hear that sound?” the sorority wrote on its Facebook page. “It’s the sound of glass ceilings continuing to shatter.”

Also showing optimism were Morgan Stanley’s analysts, who welcomed her arrival by observing, "with COVID accelerating the consumerism and digitization of health care, bringing an outsider perspective may be refreshing in an industry that has traditionally been slow to change.” 

Wall Street seemed encouraged by Brewer’s new job, too, as Walgreens’ stock rose by nearly 8% in after-hours trading last week following the announcement of her appointment.

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Walgreens CEO Roz Brewer. Courtesy photo.