What Woman CEO Wears a Baseball Cap?

Double standards for men and women's appearance

I saw this image on LinkedIn a few months ago. On the left is Peter McGuinness, CEO of Impossible Foods, and on the right, Ethan Brown, CEO of Beyond Meat. (While Ethan Brown is the founder of Beyond Meat, McGuinness replaced Impossible’s founder Pat Brown back in 2022, but that’s another story.)

I have been sitting on the image, waiting for the right opportunity to share and opine on its significance because it struck me as so amusingly indicative of the vegan food industry these days.

Then over the weekend, I shared a post on LinkedIn about a woman candidate who reported getting turned down (for an HR job no less) because she was told that: “you didn't put forth enough effort into your appearance given you were interviewing for a Vice President role”. The candidate surmised this was because she was not wearing makeup given that she was dressed professionally.

I immediately thought of all the CEOs and other executives in the food world I know who look like some version of these two from Impossible and Beyond. I have seen plenty of C-suite executives wearing jeans, sneakers, hoodies, and baseball caps, whether at trade shows, on panels, or in the media, whether the outlet is VegNews or Bloomberg, it doesn’t matter, they just don’t seem to care.

I have also noticed numerous images of Eat Just founder and CEO Josh Tetrick wearing a baseball cap, like this one from the company’s early Hampton Creek days.

In contrast, I cannot think of one woman leader who dresses so casually and cannot even imagine a woman showing up in anything less than conforming attire without risking being ridiculed and shunned.

I have felt the pressure myself to conform to standard women’s attire, and certainly to dye my hair once the grey streaks became too visible to ignore. I have mostly gotten away with not wearing makeup, but I used to don lipstick for media interviews, despite hating it. My weight has presented a whole additional set of challenges to contend with, given the vegan movement’s obsession with thinness. (More on all of that in another post, with new headshots coming to make the point!)

What do you think? Do you see the double standards for men and women’s appearances? Let me know in the comments or join the conversation on LinkedIn where I posted about this. (A few thought the two men above were the same lol.)

We have a lot of work to do.