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When the Estée Lauder Cos. appointed Stéphane de La Faverie as its next chief executive officer instead of Jane Lauder, some industry insiders bemoaned the fact that an opportunity was missed to have a female leader for a beauty company whose customer base is majority women.
It is a familiar refrain. Despite a lot of talk, not much progress has been made when it comes to breaking the glass ceiling at beauty’s highest levels.
While a number of beauty’s biggest manufacturers have over the past few years achieved or are nearing gender parity on their boards of directors and executive committees, this has not translated into a significant increase in the number of female CEOs at the biggest beauty brands. Beauty has also lagged in representation of women of color in the upper echelons of these same companies.
Indeed, there are only four companies in the top 20 biggest beauty manufacturers as ranked by Beauty Inc’s annual Top 100 that are led by a female chief executive officer: Sue Nabi was appointed CEO of Coty in July 2020; Leena Nair joined Chanel in December 2021; Gina Boswell was named head of Bath & Body Works in November 2022; and Jung Ae Lee was tapped by LG H&H in May 2023.
“The real story is not what is it going to take to get women leadership roles in beauty, but what is it going to take for women to have CEO roles in beauty in the biggest companies,” said Elana Drell Szyfer, CEO of RéVive Skincare.
This issue is widespread, beyond beauty. In its Women in the Workplace 2024 report, McKinsey found that while women have made important gains at every level of the corporate pipeline over the past decade, progress is surprisingly fragile, especially for women of color.
In the C-suite, women’s progress was even less sustainable, with McKinsey highlighting the primary reason women’s representation increased was because companies, on average, added positions in support functions, such as human resources, legal and IT — and hired women into these new positions. “Since companies cannot add new staff roles indefinitely, this is not a viable path to parity,” the report said.
But beauty is an industry that disproportionately serves women.
“We find it more striking when it comes to beauty, not only because the customer base is majority women, but because of the representation of women in the talent of this industry,” said Aniela Unguresan, founder and chief executive officer of Edge Empower, a firm which develops diversity, equity and inclusivity strategies for 250-plus companies including Firmenich and L’Oréal. “We have other industries where we say, ‘well, we don’t have enough gender diversity at the top, because the available talent pool is not diverse.’ This industry is not one of those.”
Pauline Brown, founder of consultancy Aesthetic Intelligence, partially blamed the commoditization of beauty for the lack of women CEOs.
“These beauty companies have become increasingly corporatized, and therefore more and more removed from the heart of what business they’re really in and who they are really selling to,” she said. “In the process, they start to look and feel less and less like beauty companies and more and more like CPG,” she said.
So what can be done? Every expert who spoke with WWD Beauty Inc insisted that a big part of the solution is to ensure that women are given P&L experience early on. “At the VP and SVP level, many women tend to have roles in HR, in finance, in non-business related or non-operating roles,” said Joelle Grunberg, a partner at McKinsey. “The sooner they lead a P&L, whatever the size, the sooner they’re put into the loop of having these opportunities expand in terms of size of P&L and geographies, and having access to potentially being CEOs down the road. There will be no CEO evolution if you’ve never managed a P&L or a region.”
Companies also need to offer the support for women to be able to accept these opportunities early on, she added. “This just doesn’t happen overnight,” said Grunberg. “These are cycles that you have to nurture throughout years of a career.”
“[P&L] is one of those experiences that help people be ready for the big jobs,” said Unguresan. “What we see in the beauty industry, contrary to other industries, is that we still have this strong representation of women, up until about two levels under the CEO level. It’s like a switch.”
She believes that to combat this, companies need to more productively manage the talent pool and work out what are the critical steps that make people ready for their next career move.
A lack of these opportunities and a surge in the number of beauty brands being founded has led to a number of women exiting beauty’s biggest companies to take on a brand CEO role. But while this gives them invaluable experience, it’s not always an easy path back to a big corporate entity.
“Often what happens is, if you spend a good deal of time as a CEO in a smaller, private equity-backed company, it’s can be hard to go back into the big companies,” said Drell Szyfer, “because they’ll look at your experience and say, well, they have good P&L experience, but they’re not working on a $750 million global brand.”
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