P&G Put a Woman in Charge of Razors. Then It Handed the Rest to Men

Here is the story Procter & Gamble would like to tell you.

The Good News Story

On 1 July, Juliana Azevedo took the corner office at Gillette, becoming the first woman ever to run a grooming empire that reaches close to 800 million people through Gillette, Venus, Braun and King C. Gillette. A 1996 marketing intern in Brazil who trained as an industrial engineer, she was the first woman to lead P&G's Latin America business and the company's own executive sponsor for gender equality.

It is exactly the kind of promotion a consumer giant likes to put on a slide. A 125-year-old brand that has never had a woman at the top finally does. Someday, a former chief executive had once promised, P&G would be led by a woman. At its brand Gillette, that someday has arrived.

It is a genuinely good story. P&G told it loudly. They paired Azevedo with a clutch of other women newly elevated to president-level roles. And noted that women held 51% of its management ranks in 2025. Look at who's rising, was the clear message. But if you look a little deeper, you see who's leaving.

Three Seats, Three Men

In the past year, three women who ran entire business segments (the tier where succession to the very top of the company is decided) have left or are leaving. Every one of their seats has passed to a man.

And that matters in the world’s largest consumer goods company, which at the ripe old age of 188 years operates in 70 countries with its products sold in more than 180.

Five billion people use their brands - like Tide and Fairy; Olay, Head and Shoulders; Gillette, Tampax, Always; Pampers and Bounty. Altogether generating $80 billion in net sales from consumers. And in the company’s own words, “over half of whom are women and girls.”

P&G has five primary units. Three of the biggest were run by women, until 1 January when Shailesh Jejurikar took over as CEO. A 30-year veteran, he rose through the Chief Operating Officer (COO) role, usually the final stop before the top job at P&G. He hasn’t named a separate successor to the COO title and in August he added the board chairmanship to his job spec too.

The women who might have been in contention for the top job he holds now? They’re gone, or on their way out. And I’ve spent years around them, on screen, stages and closed-door rooms where companies like P&G want to be seen.

I met Alexandra Keith many years ago as co-chair of Fortune Most Powerful Women International and was blown away by her approach to running P&G’s $15-billion Beauty division. She retired in February, with Freddy Bharucha taking on the mantle of CEO Beauty back in December 2025.

Jennifer Davis, also a three-decade veteran of P&G who ran Health Care, retired this June; Paul Gama succeeded her.

Fatima Francisco, another familiar face and a regular on our global power lists, ran the Baby, Feminine and Family Care unit. Home to Pampers, Always, Tampax and Charmin, the unit is the company’s second largest with more than $20 billion in sales. She formally handed the segment over to Hesham Tohamy Abd El Hak on 1 June and retires fully on 4 September.

So, while one woman has ascended at Gillette, a business built around men's faces, the leadership of beauty, of health care, of baby and feminine care has, in a single year, moved the other way. A company that earns its money from women's and children's bodies has handed the businesses closest to those bodies to men, offering a grooming promotion as the headline.

Let me be fair though. The women P&G would prefer to highlight are real. They are senior and worth naming.

Real, Senior And A Rung Too Low

April Cielica in Global Business Services, Sue Kyung Lee in Skin Care, Marchoe Northern in North America Fabric Care, Ranya Shamoon now in charge of Global Feminine Care under Tohamy, Mindy Sherwood as Chief Sales Officer, Jasmine Xu in Greater China, plus function chiefs including Susan Street Whaley in Legal and Kristine Decker as Chief Equality and Inclusion Officer.

But note where they sit.

They are presidents and chief-function officers. A rung below the segment-CEO line. And it is the segment-CEO line, not the president tier, that has historically been the runway to the CEO’s office. From that tier, the climb to the room where P&G’s future is decided is longer. Much longer. And from September, four of the five business segment seats that shorten the journey will be run by men. Azevedo at Grooming will be the only woman among them.

Is this housecleaning, or just housekeeping?

The charitable reading is mechanical. A new CEO just took over, and big companies routinely shed senior executives who didn't get the top job once a successor is anointed. The months after a handover are the leakiest for retention. P&G has stressed the high-profile retirements are ordinary career arcs. Most of these women served three decades or more. But by the company’s own count only one man at executive-officer rank, the now retired Gillette boss Azevedo replaces, has stepped away. Over the past few months, the company has predictably rejected the word "exodus" outright.

The less charitable reading does not require a conspiracy. It only requires noticing that the women who would have been Jejurikar's most credible rivals for the throne, have left the building. A new CEO ends up surrounded at the level that decides his successor, by lieutenants of his own choosing. You also don't need a plot to see that a leader listens to the people left in the room, and that the room is losing its women. Perhaps it is not be by design, but the trend line isn’t pointing anywhere good.

And the board?

Until this summer, P&G’s board had 14 directors, five of them women. Sheila Bonini, Amy L. Chang, Debra L. Lee, Christine McCarthy and Ashley McEvoy against nine men. Roughly 36% women. Then came the mid-summer reshuffle: Jon Moeller stepped down as Executive Chairman, Jejurikar took the chair and new appointments are still settling.

Watch that board ratio.

That 36% number itself has meaning, and a memory tied to it. In 2011, Fortune magazine singled P&G’s board out for having 11 female directors. By 2020, the board had reached gender parity. An even split and a milestone a former CEO had publicly wished for, on the logic that a company selling to more than half the world's women ought to resemble its customers.

The last nine-to-five male tilt was already a real retreat from that high-water mark, even as P&G continues the DEI commitments many peers have quietly dropped. By any honest reading, the board's centre of gravity has now firmly swung male. In who chairs the company, who runs it day to day, and the direction the ratio itself is travelling.

The Pipeline Just Narrowed

The through line connects the boardroom to the businesses. A company whose fortunes rest on diapers, pads, tampons and the daily rituals of women's lives has, within a single year, watched its most senior women cycle out of precisely the seats from which a female CEO would plausibly have emerged. It has handed beauty, baby and feminine care to men.

In 2024, Jon Moeller, who was then P&G’s CEO, said he'd be "very surprised" if the company weren’t eventually led by a woman. That might still happen, albeit in a faraway future. Because the pipeline to that outcome just narrowed.

Azevedo's name on the Gillette door is good news. It is also the brightest thing P&G could hold up in front of a year that runs the other way.