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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