"T he reality is that diversity in every industry appears to be a bottom-line issue," says Roxane Gay. But last year, Taylor was convicted of a $16 million Ponzi scheme and sentenced to 20 years in prison. He is not the youngest ever-that was Ephren Taylor II, who in 2006 at age 23, became CEO of City Capital Corporation. įrom a close look this past summer at the Fortune 500, the Executive Leadership Council, a membership organization for black business leaders, concluded that although no organization tracks this definitively, Gay is most likely the youngest black CEO of a publicly traded company.
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My brother Joel just became the youngest black CEO of a publicly traded company and the 10th ever (appalling). "If you look at Energy Recovery, we're very much a microcosm of General Electric ( GE), or Schlumberger ( SLB), or Dover ( DOV), or any of these large diversified industrials who recognize that companies succeed through diversity." "Ultimately, we're all going to migrate to a global, multinational, multi-ethnic workforce," Gay tells Yahoo Finance. But it is a problem that Joel Gay believes will improve over time as companies get more global. Just 23 of Fortune 500 CEOs are women, and just five are black. There is a frustrating lack of diversity in the C-suites of corporate America, not just in racial terms, but in gender as well.
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She didn't mean it was appalling that her brother, only 38 years old, had attained the top spot at a publicly traded company, but that, by most accounts, he was only the 10th black businessperson to do so.Īnd she was right.
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When Joel Gay became CEO of Energy Recovery ( ERII) in April, his sister Roxane Gay, a vocal novelist and essayist who has a devoted following on Twitter, called it "appalling."