Why is Ethan Brown Keynoting the Vegan Women Summit?

Latest example of white men failing up

Over the weekend, the Vegan Women Summit announced it just scheduled (less than a week out) a “keynote chat” with Beyond Meat founder and CEO Ethan Brown.

There is so much to say about the absurdity of this, it’s hard to know where to begin. Starting with the obvious, question: you couldn’t find, you know, a woman? Moreover, Brown is hardly a champion of women “industry leaders”.

Let’s take a look at the corporate leadership shall we?

Women comprise just one-third of the nine board seats. Given that California law now requires at least one woman on corporate boards, the company is more than compliant there, but that’s a ridiculously low bar. And of course, the board chair is a man.

More significantly, of the seven executives Beyond Meat lists on its “corporate governance” page only one is a woman.

In 2022, I wrote about a round of layoffs at Beyond Meat, asking if employees were being scapegoated for bad management. I listed the exorbitant compensation packages for five top executives (all but one male) and questioned Brown’s inequitable approach to his own compensation.

Public companies are required to report the ratio of the CEO’s compensation to that of the median employee, as a measure of how equitably the company is paying its staff.

Let’s just say at Beyond Meat, not very.

That ratio was a whopping 91:1 in 2021. Brown’s total package was close to $6.6 million, compared to just over $72,000 for the median employee, which is how you get to the 91: 1 ratio.

I looked up the figures for 2022.

The ratio has only gotten worse, it’s now 100:1.

While Brown’s base salary of $500,000 has remained the same, his overall annual compensation was higher at $6.7 million and more troubling, the median salary for all other employees dropped to $67,668 so that’s how you get 100:1. While it’s true that worse ratios are standard in corporate America, let’s go back to where we started.

Ethan Brown is being put on stage by the Vegan Women Summit to discuss “empowering the next generation of industry leaders”. Will they be discussing these inequities at Beyond? I am guessing not.

And let’s not forget that Beyond Meat has not exactly been performing well. The company’s massive challenges resulting in its stock being in freefall since the 2019 overhyped IPO is well documented. Then came an additional 23 percent stock drop in 2023, despite the rest of the stock market doing very well. Also last year, the company reported decreases in both revenue and profits. More layoffs are predicted for this year.

It seems that white male leaders of the vegan food industry fail up, while women founders of successful brands get the boot. So perhaps its understandable that the Vegan Women Summit selected a failing male CEO. Most of the successful women leaders are long gone. But somehow I doubt that will be a topic of conversation at the event.

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