Good morning,
As the C-suite turnover continues across corporate America, one fewer Fortune 500 company will have a CEO and CFO who are both women.
Kohl’s announced on Tuesday that Michelle Gass will step down as CEO and a member of the board of directors on Dec. 2. Levi Strauss & Co. then announced that Gass will take on the role of president beginning on Jan. 2. She will succeed Chip Bergh as CEO within the next 18 months. Tom Kingsbury, a company director and the former CEO of Burlington Stores, was appointed the interim CEO at Kohl's while the company looks for a permanent replacement for Gass.
CFO Jill Timm is staying with the company, a Kohl’s spokesperson told me. Timm, who joined Kohl’s in 1999, held several leadership roles across finance before becoming CFO in November 2019.
Gass’s tenure at Kohl’s is marked by “bold strategic moves such as adding Amazon return desks and Sephora shops at hundreds of Kohl’s stores,” but also “several bruising battles with activist investors over the last year,” my colleague Phil Wahba writes. In his piece, “Why Levi Strauss’s CEO thinks Michelle Gass is the right person to succeed him despite her trouble turning Kohl’s around,” he examines Gass’s tenure and what Bergh thinks of her leadership.
Wahba writes: “Kohl’s is one of Levi’s largest wholesale accounts, meaning Gass and Bergh have known each other for years. In a 2018 Fortune profile of Gass, Bergh praised her analytical rigor, saying, ‘she had dug into consumer data insights and really tried to understand what Levi’s needed from Kohl’s and was ‘a really quick study.’”
Under Gass's watch, sales at Kohl's typically hovered near $19 billion, “except for 2020, when COVID decimated sales,” Wahba writes. But the “lackluster numbers” were “despite Gass’s success building a niche for Kohl’s in activewear, now 25% of sales,” for example, and progress in e-commerce with “online sales now totaling $6 billion a year,” he writes. You can read more about why Bergh chose Gass to succeed him at Levi’s here.
Gass, a Starbucks veteran, joined Kohl’s in 2013 as chief merchandising and customer officer and was promoted to CEO in May 2018. For the past three years, Kohl’s was among the companies on the Fortune 500 with both a female CEO and CFO. Other such companies include, Insight Enterprises CEO Joyce Mullen and CFO Glynis Bryan; Jackson Financial CEO Laura Prieskorn and CFO Marcia Wadsten; and Bath & Body Works Executive Chair and Interim CEO Sarah Nash and CFO Wendy Arlin. On Dec. 1, former Unilever executive Gina Boswell will become CEO of Bath & Body Works.
When taking a look at the Fortune 500 list, which ranks America’s largest companies, the total number of women who are CEOs is now 44, up from 41 in 2021. According to executive search firm Crist Kolder Associates’s volatility report, as of July 31, 7.3% of CEOs in the Fortune 500 and S&P 500 are women, compared to 6.9% in all of 2021. And, as of July, 16% of CFOs are women, compared to 15.1% in 2021. The numbers are slightly ticking up.
See you tomorrow.
Sheryl Estrada
sheryl.estrada@fortune.com
