Yesterday, Spotify founder and CEO Daniel Ek introduced that he’ll be stepping down within the new yr. Two of his high executives, Gustav Söderström, chief product and expertise officer, and Alex Norström, chief enterprise officer, will take over as co-CEOs in his place.
With that information, the music streamer turned the third firm to decide on the co-CEO route inside the house of simply over per week. A couple of days earlier, on Sept. 29, Comcast stated that its sitting CEO Brian Roberts might be joined by Michael Cavanagh, former president, in January. (The association is being learn as a part of a succession plan.) And at Oracle per week earlier than, ex-CEO Safra Catz moved into the vice-chair position, and was changed by Clay Magouyrk, former head of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, and Mike Sicilia, who beforehand ran Oracle Industries.
The trio of bulletins was exceptional, and factors to a micro pattern: leaders sharing the nook workplace, a observe beforehand extra frequent for personal fairness corporations and varied outliers, like Netflix. It’s additionally notable that each one the members of the brand new gang of co-CEOs are males.
This isn’t an enormous shock: Males dominate C-suites and the CEO job in company America. And the boys who gained new roles this month could also be one of the best or most evident candidates inside their peer teams. Nonetheless, when corporations select to double the variety of individuals holding the highest title, one may assume it might enhance the percentages {that a} girl can be tapped for the job. At one time, earlier than DEI turned a fraught subject, corporations proudly touted their commitments to gender range in management.
However Fortune has discovered that mixed-gender co-CEO pairs are exceedingly uncommon, lately and traditionally. Though ladies co-CEOs aren’t uncommon amongst women-founded startups, feminine co-CEOs at massive corporations are even rarer than ladies operating corporations solo.
By the numbers
Right here’s what the information present: Amongst Fortune 500 corporations, simply 11% of organizations are led by ladies—although one in 10 is a excessive level after years of gradual progress. Our Fortune 500 Europe and Fortune International 500 lists additionally present ladies lagging far behind males in CEO jobs, with ladies operating solely 6% of corporations on each rankings.
And after we seemed again at Fortune 500 knowledge on co-CEO setups stretching again to 1998, we discovered solely three examples of paired chief executives that included ladies. We couldn’t discover any examples of two ladies sharing the CEO job at a Fortune 500 agency.
For many years, Herbert and Marion Sandler, a pair, ran Golden West Monetary earlier than it was bought by Wachovia in 2006. At Intel, two interim co-CEOs have been in cost this yr in the course of the three-month hole between one CEO’s departure final December and a brand new chief’s appointment in March. And at Oracle, Safra Catz and the late Mark Hurd shared the co-CEO job for 5 years, from 2014 till 2019, when Hurd died from an undisclosed sickness. (One caveat: That is primarily based on knowledge from Fortune’s yearly Fortune 500 rankings, which supply snapshots of company management on the time of publication. If different ladies have been appointed to short-lived co-CEO roles between our publishing dates, we could have missed them.)
Around the globe, there are different examples: The U.Ok.-based division retailer Marks & Spencer appointed a mixed-gender duo in 2022, and the pair shared the job for 2 years, whereas German software program chief SAP appointed mixed-gender CEOs in 2019, who labored collectively for one yr earlier than reported points with disorganization led to a split-up. In each instances, the ladies co-CEOs departed, and the boys stayed on as sole CEOs.
‘Male prodigies struggle it out’
Our findings replicate a management pipeline drawback that has been well-covered by Fortune through the years: Ladies are nonetheless not sitting in essentially the most {powerful} roles inside the C-suite, particularly the CFO and COO jobs, which usually tend to produce future CEOs. Boards and govt leaders aren’t doing sufficient to place ladies on the trail to the highest job. The few ladies who do crack the C-suite have a tendency to carry roles like CHRO, CMO, or normal counsel.
At Free Float Analytics, an impartial analysis agency that research boards and govt leaders, analysts Matt Moscardi and Damion Rallis have additionally analyzed ladies within the C-suite and on the boards of the numerous corporations going public this yr. As Fortune first reported, they discovered what they known as a “Bro IPO” pattern this summer season with ladies representing solely 11% of 205 executives in management roles listed in IPO filings within the first half of August. Stepping again, they noticed the identical pattern once they seemed at IPOs for the primary seven months of 2025.
In line with their evaluation of securities filings, 86% of the executives at corporations that filed to go public in that point interval have been males, a big hike in contrast with 2024, throughout which males made up 63% of executives at corporations making their buying and selling debut. (They discovered one co-CEO pairing within the IPO knowledge. The co-CEOs have been each males.)
Rallis factors out that in lots of instances, the co-CEOs are basically competing for the favor of a still-powerful founder or former chief govt. At Spotify, Ek is transferring into an govt chair place, that means he can have final management over main choices. And Larry Ellison, Oracle’s cofounder and one of many richest individuals on the earth, stays chairman of Oracle and its chief expertise officer. They “don’t really cede management, they stick round to keep up order and dominance,” Rallis says, likening all-male co-CEO appointments to “a CEO Starvation Video games to amuse the king.”
“I see it as male dictators with a lot energy and ego that they let their male prodigies struggle it out to see who will grow to be high canine,” Rallis says.
Coco Brown, CEO of Athena Alliance, a membership group for senior govt ladies, says that she sees the bro IPOs and latest knowledge exhibiting ladies’s energy slipping as a part of a latest shift towards embracing “masculinity” within the company setting, as Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg put it throughout his look on The Joe Rogan Expertise podcast in January.
“In some a part of the zeitgeist,” Brown says, “there’s this backlash to the sense of femininity being introduced into the workforce.” There’s a sense, she added, “that we’ve softened the workforce and it must get some grit again and a few guts again.”
However she additionally suspects this batch of appointments could also be a part of a extra acquainted story— when a person in energy says, “I get to decide on my buddies. I get to decide on what’s comfy.”
