Diversity improves for Amazon leadership

SEATTLE — Amazon last year made seven new additions — including two women — to its senior leadership team, the upper echelon of the company, which meets regularly with CEO Jeff Bezos to set goals and strategy for the Seattle-based tech and commerce giant.

Two longtime executives also left the so-called S Team going into 2020.

Even with the changes, the S Team remains less diverse than Amazon as a whole, though the recent additions reduced that disparity somewhat.

Colleen Aubrey, vice president of performance advertising, and Christine Beauchamp, vice president of Amazon fashion, joined senior vice president of human resources Beth Galetti, who had been the only woman on the S Team.

In 2018, nearly 42 percent of the company’s global workforce identified as women, according to Amazon’s most recent disclosures.

Nineteen of the 22 S Team members, or 86 percent, are white. Among the company’s U.S. workforce, nearly 39 percent identified as white, while management ranks were nearly 62 percent white at the end of 2018. The company said earlier this year it now has more than 500,000 employees in the U.S.

With the new additions, the group has shifted a bit younger. The average age of S Team members now is 51, down from 53. The average Amazon tenure of the group is nearly 16 years, down from more than 18.

Ivy League universities are heavily represented on the S Team: Five individuals, including Bezos, were undergraduates at Princeton, while Harvard, Columbia, Yale, Dartmouth and other elite institutions such as Stanford, University of California, Berkeley, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology can each claim at least one alumni currently on the S Team.

At least 15 members majored as undergraduates in a STEM field — science, technology, engineering or math — and more than half have MBAs or other graduate business degrees, though not everyone focused their studies on business or STEM. General counsel David Zapolsky majored in music. Head of worldwide operations Dave Clark’s undergraduate major was education. Corporate affairs chief Jay Carney, the former Obama administration press secretary and journalist, majored in Russian and East European studies.

The lack of diversity among top Amazon executives — and in the technology industry broadly — has been a subject of criticism for years.

Amazon’s 10-person board of directors added two women of color.