The Fortune 500 list for 2021 is historic, featuring two Black female CEOs for the first time ever. The 67th edition of Fortune 500 featured Rosalind “Roz” Brewer, the CEO of Walgreens Boots Alliance, and Thasunda Brown Duckett, the CEO of TIAA.
The annual Fortune 500 list features the 500 largest American companies by total revenue.
Brewer, a former Starbucks executive, was appointed CEO of Walgreens in March, according to TheGrio.
Brown Duckett took over TIAA as CEO in February. Before that, she was CEO of Chase Consumer Banking, replacing another Black CEO who retired from his post.
TIAA is the only Fortune 500 company to have two consecutive Black CEOs.
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In an interview with ABC, Brown Duckett said, “It does not escape me that I am standing on the shoulders of giants, including the cooks and janitors and others who look like me and were first to enter corporate America. They created the space for me to have this opportunity. My hope is that corporate America realizes that talent is created equally, but opportunity is not, and we all acknowledge that there’s still more work to be done.”
Brewer and Brown Duckett follow in the footsteps of Ursula Burns, the first Black female CEO of a Fortune 500 firm. She ran Xerox from 2009 to 2016, according to the Harvard Business Review.
Additionally, the 2021 Fortune 500 includes the most female CEOs for the first time in history, with 41 total. Karen S. Lynch is the highest-ranking of the 41 and leads the pharmacy and health company CVS Health. The retailer made over $268 billion in revenue in its latest fiscal year, according to TheGrio.
The companies on the 2021 Fortune 500 combine for a total of $13.8 trillion in revenues. Black Enterprise reported that the companies accounted for around two-thirds of the U.S. economy.
