Hershey CEO’s exit knocks the number of women running Fortune 500 companies

– Sweet and sour. The Fortune 500 will soon be down one female CEO after Hershey’s announced yesterday that longtime chief Michele Buck will hand over the reins of the $11.2 billion-in-revenue chocolate-maker Aug. 18.

Buck had already announced her plans to retire, but moved up the timeline by almost a year. Her successor is Kirk Tanner, a PepsiCo alum-turned-CEO of Wendy’s who led the fast food chain’s collabs with brands from Spongebob to Takis.

When the 2025 Fortune 500 was published a month ago, 55 companies on the list were led by female CEOs. Buck was one of the longer-tenured among that group; she’d led Hershey since 2017. She well outlasted the average tenure of a female Fortune 500 chief, which has hovered around four years for a decade. (For men, it’s seven—which Buck also beat.)

But Buck has said, per the Wall Street Journal, that she stayed in the CEO job for longer than she planned, after being asked by her board. In her recent months on the job, she dealt with a tough environment for the candy-makers, from high cocoa prices to slowed consumer spending to “Make America Healthy Again”‘s criticism of artificial dyes and processed foods.

On the Fortune 500, women are still running more than 10% of companies, if not quite the 11% that stat hit in June. The 71-year-old ranking of America’s largest companies first crossed the 10% mark for female CEOs in 2023. One CEO’s retirement is hardly a problem for female CEOs writ large, but when dealing with numbers this small, every hire or exit matters. Hershey conducted a search for Buck’s replacement and went with an external candidate. That’s where men seem to have an advantage—between 2024 and 2025 no female executives were hired into Fortune 500 CEO jobs, only promoted to them from within.

Emma Hinchliffe
emma.hinchliffe@fortune.com

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