Forbes admits most innovative CEOs ranking sexist and ‘flawed’

Forbes Magazine may be best known for its lists of the world’s wealthiest billionaires, but its recent ranking of the most innovative CEOs is the one that has been getting the most attention — and not for good reason.

Last week, Forbes published its list of 100 CEOs — or as it called them, “the most creative and successful business minds of today” — the top of which included a predictable catalog of tech titans and billionaires including Tesla’s Elon Musk and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos (who tied for first; Bezos is also the owner of The Washington Post).

The list included Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and Apple’s Tim Cook (No. 3 and No. 8, respectively) and Google’s Larry Page and Sergey Brin (tied for No. 10).

But readers had to scroll all the way down to No. 75 to find the first — and only — woman on the list, Ross Stores CEO Barbara Rentler. A photo of her was not included.

Social media users quickly took notice.

“Come on @Forbes, WHAT WERE YOU THINKING???” tweeted Sarah Robb O’Hagan, the former CEO of indoor cycling studio Flywheel Sports and former president of Equinox gyms. “I can come up with 100 women at this level without even googling. FIGURE IT OUT.”

Author Anand Giridharadas noted that “there are twice as many men named Stanley as there are women of any name” on the list. “And there are only two Stanleys.”

Nextdoor CEO Sarah Friar, who is on the board of directors of Slack and Walmart, tweeted: “At first I thought maybe they had a men’s and women’s list,” followed by the slapping-my-head emoji.

By Sunday, Forbes’ editor, Randall Lane, had posted a response to the uproar, admitting the methodology was “flawed.”

On Monday, as the outcry continued, Lane said in an email to employees that he was announcing a task force that would study how it “somehow missed the forest from the trees” and recommend how to design lists and research projects more fairly, saying “we deserved the backlash.”

In a tweet Monday afternoon, he wrote, “We blew it. Now we’re doing what journalists do: figuring out how this happened and learning from it.”

In his post, Lane wrote that the list wasn’t subjectively decided by a group of editors sitting in a room, but was based on a methodology it had been working on for years with professors at Brigham Young University and INSEAD.