Quotas Can Help Fix the Glaring Whiteness of America’s C-Suites
They’ve helped women. Why not apply them to the boardrooms and middle management of the Fortune 500?
At a virtual panel moderated by Goldman Sachs Group Inc. Chief Executive Officer David Solomon on the evening of June 9, Jide Zeitlin made a simple but pointed comment. “We better have more than four Black CEOs of Fortune 500 companies,” said the boss of Tapestry Inc., which owns Coach, Kate Spade, and Stuart Weitzman. “And not in 10 years. Not in 15 years. But in the next year or two or three.”
The Whiteness of America’s C-suites has always been glaring, but this call by Zeitlin—one of the four current African American corporate leaders and just 17 over the last two decades—is even more urgent against the backdrop of massive protests over police brutality and entrenched racism.