CMOs’ waning influence in the C-suite is a setback for female executives

Good morning, Broadsheet readers! The Biden-Harris administration marks the latest anniversary of Roe v. Wade, Nikki Haley goes up against Trump in New Hampshire, and CMOs are losing influence in the C-suite. Have a lovely Tuesday.

- More than marketing. In 2022, women outnumbered men in chief marketing officer jobs for the first time, according to a study by Spencer Stuart. New hires were to thank for that milestone; women held 51% of all CMO jobs that year and represented 70% of new appointees.

But—as so often happens—it seems that women reached a milestone only to have the rug pulled out from under them. My Fortune colleague Phil Wahba has a new story about the waning influence of the CMO job in corporate C-suites. In December alone, UPS eliminated the CMO job; Etsy gave its CMO's responsibilities to its COO; and Walgreens laid off CMO Linh Peters and spread out her job's functions.

The end of the autonomous CMO role, at some companies, is part of a longtime trend. CMOs who once focused on marketing and advertising in print and TV now find themselves in tech-heavy jobs, driven by customer data, and needing the input of other C-suite executives focused on tech and operations. It's no longer a role that can be handled by—or requires—one executive, companies seem to have decided.

It's a bit of a paradox. During the pandemic, the ability of an executive "to tell the story of a company" became more valuable, whether those skills were in marketing or communications, Korn Ferry's Jane Stevenson told me last year. A higher value placed on those skills began to open up opportunities, like CEO jobs and board seats, for marketing executives—many of them women—who once saw CMO as the highest they could go. Openness to new areas of expertise and non-CEO candidates has helped boards to diversify. Still, today less than 5% of Fortune 1000 companies have a marketer on their board of directors; those that do are consumer-facing brands including Best Buy, Mattel, and Nike, Phil found.

How these jobs are structured seems to be changing, yet it remains to be seen whether the evolution is permanent. As of today, 71% of the Fortune 500 still has a marketing chief, and some companies that cut the job may end up rethinking the decision. McDonald's got rid of its global CMO role in 2019 but brought it back less than a year later.

Read more in Phil's full story here.

Emma Hinchliffe
emma.hinchliffe@fortune.com
@_emmahinchliffe

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This story was originally featured on Fortune.com