analysis of data from Equilar shows that just about whatever number you come up with, it’s probably too high.hen U.K.-based pharmaceutical giant GSK announced recently that it had poached Julie Brown from Burberry to serve as its new chief financial officer, headlines rejoiced. The coverage was focused on the fact that, in joining CEO Emma Walmsley in GSK’s C-suite, Brown was creating an all-female duo at the top of the company. In the corporate world, that’s a rarity.
“There was nobody like me,” says Bryan, the CFO of Insight Enterprises, a business-to-business tech company. Bryan, who is Black, says the message she got from female role models—“you can do anything you want to do”—got her through moments when systemic bias could have thwarted her.Bryan has a story about doing major profit-and-loss deals as a junior executive at her former employer, at Ryder System, the transportation and logistics firm.
Bryan was eventually promoted to CFO of Ryder Transportation Services, Ryder’s largest business unit, before joining Insight Enterprises in 2007. When Mullen accepted Insight’s CEO position at the beginning of this year, she says it was in no small part because of Bryan’s presence.