Black executives hold few positions at Top 100 companies

Among the rarest of sights in the world of government contracting is a Black woman executive.

Of the 1,259 executives we identified at Top 100 companies, we found that only 24 were Black women. That is just 1.9% of all executives.

Black men hold 39 executive positions among the Top 100, or 3.1% of the total. That number includes two Black men who are either chairman of the board of directors in Dave Steward of World Wide Technologies (No. 61), or chief executive in the case of Rene LaVigne of Iron Bow Technologies (No. 52).

Black executives hold just 5% of the positions we identified in our analysis.

This is the fourth consecutive year that we’ve tracked racial and gender representation in the senior leadership teams at Washington Technology Top 100 companies.

With such low numbers for Black executives, it shouldn’t be a surprise that 59 companies in the Top 100 have zero. Breaking it down by gender, we found that 61 had no Black men executives and 72 have no Black women executives.

Of the Top 100, 28 companies have at least one Black woman executive and 31 have at least one Black man. Six companies have more than one woman executive who is Black, and seven have more than one Black man executive.

Six companies had both a Black woman and a Black man serving in executive positions.

The 41 companies that we identified with at least one Black man or woman executive is an improvement from last year, when we identified Black executives at 37 companies.

Men continue to dominate the Top 100 leadership teams as they hold 885 executive positions or 70.3%, including 78 that are CEOs. Women executives accounted for 374 positions or 29.7%, and within that 22 are CEOs.

Three top 10 companies are led by women – General Dynamics, Northrop Grumman and Science Applications International Corp.

SAIC CEO Nazzic Keene will retire in October and her successor is a Black woman, Toni Townes-Whitley.

Six companies had no women executives. That is an improvement when compared to last year, when we identified 15 companies that didn’t list any women executives on their websites.

We’re also tracking other minority groups and found 100 executives, or 7.9% of the 1,259 belong to other minority groups. Those executives include Asian, Hispanic and other ethnicities. Eight of these executives hold CEO or chairperson positions at their companies.

Overall, we’ve seen a slight improvement, though the Black demographic is still dismal. The pace of change reminds us of two things:

There is still much work to be done and change is painfully slow.