Good morning, Broadsheet readers! Bumble devotes a new app to friends, Waymo goes all in on ride-hailing, and Gap Inc. hires two new CEOs. Have a restful weekend.
– New hires. This week, Gap Inc. announced two new CEOs, one to lead its Athleta brand and one to run the whole retail business. The Gap Inc. role had sat vacant for more than a year, and Athleta has been without a permanent chief executive since March.
Both of those roles were previously held by women: Gap Inc. CEO Sonia Syngal and Athleta CEO Mary Beth Laughton. The two new hires are both men.
Richard Dickson, a Mattel alum credited with turning around the Barbie franchise, will lead Gap Inc. Chris Blakeslee, the former president of uber-hot brand Alo Yoga, will take over Athleta.
The new hires are a stark departure from recent years in which Gap Inc. has leaned into women’s leadership and serving its female customer base. Syngal left the company after its Old Navy brand stumbled when introducing inclusive sizing in stores, a groundbreaking if poorly executed initiative. And Athleta has made itself a cornerstone of women’s empowerment, sponsoring athletes and launching lines with Allyson Felix, Simone Biles, and Alicia Keys.
For those who care about women’s representation among Fortune 500 leaders (currently at 10.4%), Syngal’s 2022 exit was notable. She was one of few women of color to lead a Fortune 500 company. The retail sector, usually a reliable source of big-business female CEOs, has lost several leaders. Kohl’s former chief executive Michelle Gass, for instance, left that role to become Levi Strauss‘s president.
The CEO turnover reflects the industry’s on-going trouble; in fact, earlier this year, half of all Fortune 500 companies without a permanent CEO were retailers. Gap Inc. was one of them. Now at the helm, Dickson has a major challenge in front of him. The Gap and Banana Republic brands continue to struggle, as my colleague Phil Wahba writes for Fortune. The Gap brand’s 2022 sales were $3.7 billion—down 40% from a decade ago. Blakeslee faces an uphill battle too. Athleta was a bright spot for the company, but has encountered some of the same challenges as other brands that compete in the athleisure space.
The Gap CEO vacancies were certainly a missed opportunity to bring more female leaders into the Fortune 500 universe, but had that happened, we might say they faced a glass cliff. That language doesn’t apply here, but the stakes are still high. Dickson and Blakeslee will be tasked with shepherding two female-focused brands through retail’s rough waters, a feat—to their credit—they both seem to have achieved in the past.
The new hires also underscore just how rare it is to see a company appoint two female CEOs in a row—Xerox, Avon Products, and Reynolds American remain some of the few examples—and the ongoing need to build a strong pipeline of diverse talent behind the women who make it to the C-suite.
Emma Hinchliffe
emma.hinchliffe@fortune.com
@_emmahinchliffe
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ALSO IN THE HEADLINES
- Twitter goes Hollywood. Twitter CEO Linda Yaccarino spent much of the past week in Hollywood, pitching agents and execs on the future of "X." She's attempting to bring more stars back to the rebranded platform. Financial Times
- Ready to ride. Waymo, led by co-CEO Tekedra Mawakana, is pivoting away from self-driving trucks and to ride-hailing. The Alphabet business isn't abandoning trucking entirely but will push its trucking timeline and focus on passenger transit. TechCrunch
- Money moves. Bloom Money, a U.K.-based fintech company, has raised £1 million. The startup aims to apply technology to "rotating savings and credit association," or a family-and-friends form of banking employed by different communities around the world. CEO Nina Mohanty says the platform could help communities of color avoid discrimination in banking. TechCrunch
- At the White House. Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni met with U.S. President Joe Biden at the White House yesterday. The visit courted some controversy due to Meloni's far-right politics, but the Biden administration has found common ground with the Italian politician on her support for Ukraine. PBS Newshour
IN CASE YOU MISSED IT
- Moms in action. The Women's World Cup is underway in Australia. As the U.S. Women's National Team takes the field, their success shows what can happen when employers respect and empower working moms, author Macaela MacKenzie argues in this piece. U.S. Soccer now provides six months of paid parental leave and fully-funded childcare during training and competition. Washington Post
- Find my friends. Bumble is taking friend-finding off of its flagship app. The dating app, which previously had a Bumble BFF mode within its main service, is launching a standalone app for platonic relationships. TechCrunch
- Pay up. Yesterday was Black Women's Equal Pay Day, which marks how far into the new year Black women in the U.S. have to work to earn what white men did the year before. As Amber Burton writes for Broadsheet sister newsletter CHRO Daily, the day is about more than the wage gap—it's about who has access to upward mobility at work. Fortune
ON MY RADAR
Who will stand up for the hair braiders? Harper's Bazaar
Steve Wynn agrees to stay out of Nevada's gambling industry Wall Street Journal
Ann Roth is Hollywood's secret weapon New York Times
PARTING WORDS
"We can’t change history, but we can and will change the way history is told."
—Penny Pritzker, former commerce secretary and chair of the Smithsonian American Women’s History Museum’s Advisory Council. The museum partnered with the U.S. Mint to bring five new women—Rev. Dr. Pauli Murray, Patsy Takemoto Mink, Dr. Mary Edwards Walker, Celia Cruz and Zitkala-Ša—to U.S. quarters in 2024.
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