The world’s largest food companies still have a gender problem at the top. A quick test: name the women CEOs of the biggest food FMCGs. The top positions are all held by men. Nestlé is led by Philipp Navratil, Unilever by Fernando Fernandez, Mondelez by Dirk Van de Put and Danone by Antoine de Saint-Affrique, with The Coca-Cola Company, General Mills and Kraft Heinz in the same position.
Long-time industry observers will remember the women who did reach the top, among them Indra Nooyi, Irene Rosenfeld and Michele Buck. Today, none of the world’s largest food producers has a female CEO, and women who make it to the C-suite are still passed over for the top jobs.
Two reasons stand out. The first is managing profit and loss: big P&Ls still seem to be a man’s world, with the best-worn routes to the top, whether through the CFO or COO track, heavily male-dominated. Among the companies mentioned, there is only one woman CFO and one woman COO, both at Nestlé.
The second is motherhood, a disadvantage in an industry where taking months or years off to raise children is difficult. FMCG has a global reach, is travel-heavy and crisis-prone, with businesses dealing with food safety issues, commodity spikes and supply-chain shocks on a daily basis. As employees move up the ladder, there is an expectation that they will be available at all times, and not every woman can meet that requirement.
Both issues are, in a certain way, systemic. Without mandated equal parental leave for men and women, women will continue to take longer to raise children, and businesses can choose to provide equal parental leave on their own, a decision that will be watched closely at companies such as Unilever as the industry’s leadership changes hands. The P&L problem should be addressed early in the careers of future leaders, with high-potential women rotated into revenue and operations roles from the start.
Spencer Stuart, the executive search and leadership consulting firm, advises treating the goal like a talent plan: look at leadership abilities rather than the “right” path, track the statistics to see where women are dropping out, give them specific steps for gaining P&L experience and provide mentors.
With FMCG experiencing a new leadership transition, the food and beverage sector cannot continue to overlook women in top positions, and whether the next generation of leaders changes the picture will shape food and beverage trends for years to come. The full analysis is available from FoodNavigator.