I didn’t know Land O’ Lakes was a Fortune 500 company, but it is, and its new CEO, Beth Ford, is openly gay — only the third after Apple’s Tim Cook and Dow Chemical’s Jim Fitterling. If you round up, 1% of Fortune 500 CEOs are now openly LGBT!
If you had told me in 1973, when I first wrote about this stuff, that the world’s first trillion-dollar company would be run by an openly gay man (or that the 44th President of the United States would be black) — or that one of the country’s three largest cooperatives would be run by an openly gay woman (or that I would prefer a thing called Smart Balance to actual butter, however stupid that might be) — I would have considered you unhinged.
But here we are.
It’s still tough for many to be openly gay — this study tells the tale. But boy have we ever made progress. And at no cost to the taxpayer!
(If you had told me, further, we would win the first Cold War without firing a shot at Russia, but that Russia would be winning the second, having helped to elect a sociopath, I would have offered you three ways to fight back.)
Have a great weekend.
