Good morning, Broadsheet readers! Taylor Swift is Time Magazine’s 2023 Person of the Year, another woman filed a sexual assault lawsuit against Sean "Diddy" Combs, and a J&J exec's departure raises familiar questions about women and ambition. Have a thoughtful Thursday.
- Executive ambition. A few months ago, I interviewed Ashley McEvoy, then Johnson & Johnson's EVP and worldwide chairman for medtech, a $27 billion business at the pharma giant. We discussed her journey from leading consumer brands like Tylenol and Listerine to running a complex business entrenched in the health care industry.
McEvoy, 53, had been at J&J for 27 years at the time of our conversation, and, at the end, I asked her if she wanted to be a CEO.
It's a question that we at Fortune frequently ask executives. It can tell you a lot about an exec's career journey—whether they see themselves as winding up or winding down. It can tell you what they value—whether holding that top spot matters to them, or if other parts of their work—or personal lives—are more important. For instance, Sarah Jones Simmer, a former Bumble exec who became the CEO of the weight-loss startup Found, told me that she realized becoming a CEO was important to her after she was diagnosed with cancer. Alicia Boler Davis, a former Amazon exec who's now CEO of prescription delivery startup Alto Pharmacy, says she realized that a Fortune 500 CEO job wasn't for her. She wanted to build something from the ground up rather than continue a longstanding business strategy. It's even a revealing question for women who are already chief executives; Williams Sonoma CEO Laura Alber, for example, says she's not interested in running a different company.
When I asked McEvoy if she wanted to be a CEO, her response was swift: "Absolutely." "It's not just about CEO, it's around using its impact. It's driving—being a force in the world to effect change," she added. You may remember some of that from her interview in the Broadsheet, which published in mid-September.
According to the Wall Street Journal, McEvoy's interview with me struck a chord with another audience, namely, McEvoy's bosses at J&J. The Journal reported this week that McEvoy's "public airing of interest in a CEO role didn’t go over well among J&J’s leaders," including CEO Joaquin Duato. (It's important to note, I asked McEvoy about her interest in any CEO job.) McEvoy had been a leading contender for the J&J CEO job, the Journal reported in the story about who may be next to lead the pharma giant. Instead, McEvoy ended up announcing her resignation from J&J in late October. "It’s impossible to overstate how important this company has been to me and how grateful I am for my career here," she wrote on LinkedIn at the time. "I’m excited...for what the next chapter will bring."
The episode raises some critical questions: Is it OK for execs to voice their ambitions? And are those ambitions perceived differently when a woman is stating them?
According to 2017 research by Korn Ferry, women don't often see themselves as future CEOs. Of 57 female CEOs interviewed for the study, only five always wanted to be CEO. Three didn't want the job at all, but took it out of duty. Two-thirds "didn’t realize they could be CEO until someone else told them."
So women who do know they want to be CEOs are rare. Voicing those ambitions is even rarer.
We know that women's ambitions are perceived differently than men's. Women are seen as too ambitious, or as not ambitious enough. This is a topic that has been studied especially in politics; in 2020, academics found that voters actually didn't have a problem with ambitious women, the prime example being Kamala Harris—it was only party gatekeepers (like corporate bosses?) who objected.
We don't know for sure why McEvoy left J&J; she declined to comment on the Journal story and Johnson & Johnson didn't respond to request for comment. Whether an offhand comment in a Fortune interview contributed to her departure or not, one thing's for sure: Women shouldn't be penalized for having ambition—or being open about it.
Emma Hinchliffe
emma.hinchliffe@fortune.com
@_emmahinchliffe
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