It’s no secret that Silicon Valley companies have a problem with diversity. Tech companies, particularly when you get into the upper ranks, are largely white and male. Female executives and executives of color are a rarity. With Amazon, however, the stats are really bad.
Of the 37 executives who report directly to CEO Jeff Bezos, only two are women, CNBC discovered. And among its 18 most powerful execs, only one is a woman. CNBC got the information from an internal organization chart.
Beth Galetti is the only woman at the SVP level: she’s Amazon’s senior vice president of human resources. Teresa Carlson, Amazon’s vice president of the AWS worldwide public sector, is the only other woman among Amazon’s C-suite executives, vice presidents, and senior vice presidents. None among this list are African American; only three are Asian.
As CNBC notes, Amazon does have women leading several notable divisions of the company, however. This includes Stephenie Landry, who heads up Prime Now, Toni Reid with Alexa, and Jennifer Cast in Amazon Books.
The technology industry has come under fire recently for being a boys club. Former Uber engineer Susan Fowler perhaps most famously documented this in her memo earlier this year. In it, she outlined instances of sexual harassment, a toxic work culture, and sexism. Former Kleiner Perkins venture capitalist Ellen Pao has also shared her experiences, both through her widely publicized lawsuit against her former employer, and in her recent book Reset: My Fight for Inclusion and Lasting Change.
And while tech companies began publicly revealing diversity reports a few years ago, more recent followups show that change is slow. In many tech companies, the ratio of men to women (and white employees to Black, Latino, and Asian employees) has only modestly improved, if that.
In an email sent out following the election of President Donald Trump, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos assured employees of his commitment to diversity.“It’s not only that diversity and inclusion are good for our business. It’s more fundamental than that—it’s simply right,” he wrote. It’s high time some of that diversity starts to show in its upper ranks.
H/T CNBC