Starbucks chief operating officer Rosalind Brewer continues to open new avenues in corporate America.
At the end of February, Brewer, who is the first black COO and the first female COO of the coffee company, will leave her position to take over as CEO of the Walgreens pharmacy chain. In this new role, she will be the only black woman currently serving as CEO of Fortune 500 and only the third black woman to run a Fortune 500 company in history. Ursula Burns, who served as CEO of Xerox between 2009 and 2016, was first, and Mary Winston, who served as interim CEO at Bed Bath & Beyond in 2019, was second.
Prior to joining Starbucks in 2017, Brewer spent five years as CEO of Walmart-owned Sam’s Club. As a long-time executive in corporate America, she spoke openly about the prejudices and challenges she faced as one of the very few black women in the C-suite.
Starbucks Chief Operating Officer and Group President Rosalind “Roz” Brewer speaks at the annual shareholders’ meeting in Seattle, Washington, on March 20, 2019.
Jason Redmond | AFP | Getty Images
“When you’re a black woman, you’re very wrong,” she said during a 2018 speech at her Spelman College, which is an HBCU exclusively for women. “You’re wrong about someone who couldn’t actually have that job. Sometimes you make mistakes with the help of the kitchen. Sometimes people assume that you are in the wrong place and all I can believe in my ass is “No, you are in the wrong place. ‘”
During the speech, Brewer recalled the moment she was invited to an exclusive round table of the CEO of New York City, when she was the CEO of Sam’s Club. During the reception, she said, she met a fellow CEO and introduced herself as did the other men in the room who introduced themselves, “Pink Brewer of Sam’s Club.” After the presentation, she said that her fellow CEO asked her what she had done for the company and asked if she had led the marketing. Confused by the question, while the invitation to the event stated that it was a round table for the CEO, Brewer says that he answered, “No, this is part of my organization.”
After the man continued the conversation by wondering if he was working on merchandising, Brewer said he gave his fellow CEO a “side eye,” as it actually served as a keynote to the event. “I liked the look on his face when my biography was read,” she said. “It was a good day.”
Brewer, who ranks 48th on the Forbes 2020 Power Women list, explained that the CEO’s roundtable was one of the many incidents in which he encountered bias inside and outside work. “If there’s a place where there’s no prejudice, I haven’t found it,” she said.
Recognizing that many women face prejudice and gender discrimination in the workplace, Brewer said her biggest message to women in business is “stay strong” and know that “your voice matters.”
“Sometimes you’ll make mistakes and there are some ways to clean up your mistakes,” she told TV host Shaun Robinson in a December 2020 Facebook interview. “First, acknowledge that you made a mistake. the voice.”
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