The Fortune 500 has a record number of female and Black CEOs this year. The numbers still stink

Last October, when Fortune published its 25th Most Powerful Women list, I wrote that I had mixed feelings about the franchise. On the one hand, we’re far from equity in the leadership ranks, so it’s important to spotlight diverse executives. On the other, I can’t wait for the day when we can simply rank the world’s “most powerful,” knowing that women and people of color will naturally be all over that list.

There are signs of progress—slow, but real—in this year’s Fortune 500. Fifty-two women run companies on the list, up from 44 at this time last year, meaning more than 10% of the nation’s biggest businesses are run by the “opposite sex” for the first time ever.

The top-ranking woman is CEO Karen Lynch of CVS Health, which ranks No. 6 with $323 billion in revenue. CVS is the largest company in history to be helmed by a woman; the next biggest woman-led company is Mary Barra’s General Motors, which clocks in at No. 21 but has less than half the revenue. Lynch is flat-out one of the most powerful CEOs in the world, regardless of gender. So I’m proud to say that U.S. subscribers will see her grace the cover of our Fortune 500 issue.

The flip side of CVS being so large is that it prompts the question: Should it be? In 1995, there were no health care companies in the top 25. This year, there are eight. In that time, health care has grown from the 13th biggest industry in the Fortune 500 to the second biggest, with $2.77 trillion in revenue—just behind the financial sector. Huge companies like CVS (which, full disclosure, is a Fortune sponsor), UnitedHealth, Cigna, and Walgreens have climbed closer to the top by acquiring doctors’ practices, pharmacies, urgent care clinics, and more, and weaving them into huge national networks. 

Lynch and her peers say that the bigger they get, the better care they can provide for everyone. But the reality is that no other country monetizes its sick and elderly the way the U.S. does. And the high cost of care contributes to health and wealth inequities here, too—not to mention burdensome costs for other businesses. Fortune senior writers Erika Fry and Maria Aspan dig into whether what they call health care’s “radical, next-level bigness” is healthy for America in our cover story.

There are also more Black CEOs running Fortune 500s than ever before—but it’s shameful to say that there are still only eight. One of them, David Rawlinson, runs Qurate Retail (No. 342), the parent company of QVC. While he’s already a chief executive, we’re featuring him on our list of future star CEOs because executive recruiters expect Rawlinson will run an even larger company someday. Read more about Rawlinson and Qurate here.

Tesla made another big leap this year, with a 51% revenue gain; no other company on this year’s list made it to the Fortune 50 this quickly. But will this be the year that Tesla’s growth levels off? Vivienne Walt asks whether we’ve reached “peak Tesla.”

As always, we hope you find lots of value in this issue, and thanks for your readership.

Alyson Shontell
Editor-in-Chief, Fortune
@ajs

A version of this article appears in the June/July 2023 issue of Fortune with the headline, “More powerful than ever.”