A pair of top Black leaders at Amazon who helped oversee the company’s e-commerce operations are departing:
- Alicia Boler-Davis, senior vice president of global customer fulfillment and a member of Amazon’s senior leadership team (S-team)
- Dave Bozeman, vice president of Amazon Transportation Services
Boler-Davis resigned to pursue new opportunities, and Bozeman has taken a new role outside Amazon that will be announced shortly, an Amazon spokesperson confirmed to GeekWire.
Their departures come as Amazon reorganizes its operations organization. On Tuesday the company announced that Doug Herrington, a veteran of Amazon’s consumer business, will be promoted to the new role of CEO of Worldwide Amazon Stores following the departure of top consumer exec Dave Clark.
Another longtime executive, John Felton, will report to Herrington in the new structure.
“I want to thank Alicia and Dave for their remarkable contributions to the company and our employees,” Felton wrote in an email to employees Tuesday. “They scaled our operations, launched new capabilities and programs, and demonstrated relentless passion to make our operations better each and every day.”
Amazon’s consumer business has been struggling financially, after the company added more workers and warehouse capacity than it ultimately needed in response to the pandemic. CEO Andy Jassy, who took over last year, told shareholders last month that he was “confident we’ll get back to a healthy level of profitability in our consumer business.”
Boler Davis joined in 2019 after a 24-year career at General Motors, and was promoted to Amazon’s “S-team” a year later, becoming its only Black member at the time. The “S-team” will have no Black leaders following Boler Davis’ departure.
Bozeman joined in 2017 following stints at Caterpillar and Harley-Davidson.
Last year Amazon pledged to double Black employees in leadership after it did so in 2020. Black senior leaders made up 3.8% of the company in 2020; that number rose to 5.5% in 2021, according to Amazon’s latest diversity stats.
Black employees made up 28.2% of the company’s entire workforce last year; that number includes warehouse workers. Black corporate employees made up 8.5% of the company in 2021, up from 7.2% in 2020.
Recode reported in February 2021 that Black employees at Amazon were promoted less frequently and rated more harshly than peers. Another report from June 2021 revealed alleged racial discrimination against Black employees in the company’s human relations and hiring departments.
Microsoft in 2020 pledged to double its number of Black and African American managers and senior employees by 2025 in the U.S. Last year the company said it was nearly 40% of the way toward that goal.
