Ginni Rometty says goodbye to Big Blue

4 years ago

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January 31, 2020

Good morning, Broadsheet readers! E. Jean Carroll seeks President Trump’s DNA in her sexual assault case, Sen. Bernie Sanders wants a woman of color to be the face of the Left, and Ginni Rometty is stepping down at IBM. Have a wonderful weekend.
– Bye-bye, Big Blue. The Broadsheet team needs some kind of special siren we can sound when big news is happening in the world of female Fortune 500 CEOs. If we had one, we would have been blaring it last night when it was announced that Ginni Rometty is stepping down as chief executive of IBM.
Rometty has been an IBMer nearly 40 years and has sat in the corner office since 2012. She led the company through a challenging period— my colleague Jonathan Vanian notes that she oversaw “22 consecutive quarters of sales declines that ended in 2018” and that shares were down about 15% since she took the top job. But she also made big bets to attempt to turn things around, pivoting the company toward new businesses like A.I. and cloud computing and staking her legacy on last year’s acquisition of enterprise software firm Red Hat for a gigundo $34 billion.
Without Rometty, there are now 34 female Fortune 500 CEOs. (Technically, she will remain in the job until April, when Arvind Krishna, who currently runs IBM’s cloud computing business, will take over.) I wouldn’t recommend reading into that number too closely—it’s actually up one from where things stood in May of last year, when we published our annual Fortune 500 issue. And we already know the tally will climb higher next month when Jennifer Johnson takes the reins at Franklin Resources, only to dip again in May when Beth Mooney retires from Key Corp.
Perhaps more important is the position Rometty held within those ranks. She led the third largest company—only Mary Barra’s GM and Gail Boudreaux’s Anthem are larger. At a time when the big tech companies are reshaping our economy and our society, she was also one of the very few women to helm such a goliath; the only other female-led technology player that comes close in terms of scale is Oracle, run by Safra Catz.
So, as Rometty wraps up her time at Big Blue, here are the questions I’ll be mulling over: Who will be the next woman to rise to the top of a big tech company—and how long will it take?
Kristen Bellstrom
kristen.bellstrom@fortune.com
@kayelbee
Today’s Broadsheet was produced by Emma Hinchliffe.

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- DNA wanted. E. Jean Carroll, who wrote in her recent book that President Donald Trump raped her more than 20 years ago, is now seeking a DNA sample from the President to see if his genetic material matches DNA left on the dress she wore at the time. Trump has denied the allegation and is suing Carroll for defamation. Carroll's lawyer, Robbie Kaplan, says it's "standard operating procedure" to seek a DNA sample in a sexual assault investigation. AP
- A lasting legacy. Even if Sen. Bernie Sanders doesn't win the Democratic nomination, he may leave an important legacy: making sure that women of color are the faces of the Left. Surrounding himself with surrogates like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Women's March founder Linda Sarsour is part mission, part strategy to counter the fact that he's both white and male. Fortune
- Yet another gap. Big companies are becoming more and more likely to offer their employees paid family leave. But the companies making those changes are concentrated in certain industries—and those industries are the ones like finance and technology, where women are less likely to work. Bloomberg
MOVERS AND SHAKERS: Emma Watts , longtime production head of the former 20th Century Fox, resigned as part of the continued shakeup following Disney's acquisition. Former Labour minister Shriti Vadera will become the next chair of Prudential, the UK’s largest listed insurer.

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IN CASE YOU MISSED IT

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- Bowser for Bloomberg. In his $11 million Super Bowl ad this weekend, presidential candidate Michael Bloomberg will highlight the issue of gun violence, sharing the story of Calandrian Kemp, whose son George Kemp Jr. was shot and killed in 2013. In related news, D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser endorsed Bloomberg for president; she will become a national co-chair of the campaign.

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PARTING WORDS

"We’re winning the battles many men in the halls of Washington and state legislatures dismissed as impossible."
-Shannon Watts, founder of Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America