By CultureBanx Team
- Amazon loses its only 2 Black senior leaders as it continues to struggle with diversity
- About 70% of Amazon’s U.S. workforce, largely its hourly workers that power its operations, are not white
Ongoing diversity struggles continue to plague Amazon (AMZN +3.57%) with two senior Black executives, who led warehouses and transportation, decided to leave the company and take their talents elsewhere. Now the e-commerce giant has zero Black leaders on its senior team. This is a major setback to Amazon’s yearslong effort to diversity senior ranks.
Why This Matters: Alicia Boler Davis, the senior vice president who oversees Amazon’s fulfillment operations, and David Bozeman are the former Black Amazon leaders who are now out. Boler Davis joined Amazon in 2019 from General Motors (GM +3.77%) and Bozeman joined Amazon in 2017 from Caterpillar (CAT +1.85%).
Even though the company tries to tout it doubled the number of Black employees in the U.S. at the director and vice president levels in 2020, and by another almost 70% in 2021. The company has continued to have issues sustaining Black leaders at the highest levels of the company.
“Though we’ve made substantial progress in hiring Level 8 and Level 10 black leaders the last two years, it’s not lost on any of us that we’re losing two of our most senior black leaders,” wrote Amazon CEO Andy Jassy in an email continued.
Still only 5.5% of Amazon’s senior leaders were Black as of the end of 2021, according to company data. About 70% of Amazon’s U.S. workforce, largely its hourly workers that power its operations, are not white.
Amazon has proven it can dramatically reshape whole, seemingly disconnected industries, so leadership diversity should be easy to figure out. Research from McKinsey and MSCI shows companies with higher levels of diversity at the senior level are more likely to have strong financial performance and fewer instances of poor corporate governance.
Situational Awareness: The company is attempting to make their corporate board a little more woke by addressing the critical equity and corporate governance issues. Last year Amazon brought on former Goldman Sachs executive Edith Cooper to its board of directors and she is the only Black member, following Walgreens (WBA -0.53%) CEO Roz Brewer’s exit. Cooper’s addition to its board comes after the company faced backlash for having a lack of diversity in their executive positions.
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