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Diversity | Tech giant Amazon has female leadership problem

Tech giant Amazon has female leadership problem

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos has just promoted company veteran and early-employee Peter DeSantis to his ‘S-team’, the elite group of top executives he meets with. This has been met with mixed reviews, as it seems the Bezos is doing nothing to tackle the male-dominated executive body at Amazon.

DeSantis was promoted to the S-team, short for senior team, earlier this year. The team is very secretive but what we do know is out of the 18 members, only one is female.

Bezos did address this issue in 2017 during an internal meeting, where he claimed that the ratio was due to a very low turnover rate within the team and he expects “any transition there to happen very incrementally over a long period of time.” This being said, with the addition of yet another man to the team, it doesn’t seem like there’s much attempt to change the patriarchal system.

What’s worse is that this isn’t confined to the very upper tier. CNBC reported in January this year that almost all executives in Amazon’s core businesses of retail, cloud and hardware are white men. There are a shocking four women out of the 48 executives in place.

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