Adidas’s only female executive board member quits as exodus grows

Adidas has announced the departure of its sole female executive board member, adding to the exodus of top women at the helm of the world’s second-largest sportswear maker, which has previously come under fire for its handling of diversity issues.

Amanda Rajkumar, the global head of human resources, will leave next week after deciding not to seek an extension of her three-year contract ending in December.

Rajkumar’s departure is the latest in a string of exits of senior female managers from Adidas, including head of global marketing Vicky Free, head of global retail Nicole Ghezali and Céline Del Genes, who oversaw the specialist sports division. The number of female members of the company’s two executive leadership bodies, the management board and core leadership group, has more than halved from seven to three since the end of 2022.

Her exit is also the latest among the sports group’s senior executives since the arrival of new chief executive Bjørn Gulden at the start of this year. Gulden in March embarked on a boardroom reshuffle, ousting chief sales officer and 30-year Adidas veteran Roland Auschel. The group’s head of brands Brian Grevy also resigned as Gulden took on his role himself.

Rajkumar, a British national whose parents came from the Caribbean, joined the German company in January 2021 to stem a bitter internal uproar over Adidas’s handling of racism, diversity and inclusion. Her predecessor Karen Parkin had resigned in 2020 after describing internal discussions of racism as “noise”.

Rajkumar, whose previous roles include senior HR jobs at BNP Paribas and JPMorgan, took a hands-on role in attempting to improve diversity at Adidas. In 2021, she launched an internal survey among employees, asking them to voluntarily share personal data about their ethnicity, nationality, gender identity and sexual orientation.

Adidas did not give any reason for her sudden departure. People familiar with the internal discussion told the Financial Times that she had fallen out with Gulden over governance issues and HR priorities after the chief executive demanded a more direct say in HR matters.

They had also clashed over the HR budget and the chief executive’s management style, which he himself described as “chaotic” in an internal town hall, one of the people added. Gulden declined to comment while Rajkumar did not respond to a request for comment.

Adidas said its commitment to increasing the share of women among its managers was firm and pointed to recent successes, such as meeting internal goals for the wider leadership circle early.

Gulden was poached from rival sports brand Puma to rebuild the group, which was hit by a string of profit warnings after ditching its highly profitable Yeezy trainers brand, closing its Russian operations and suffering a backlash in China.

Adidas terminated its partnership with Kanye West also known as Ye, with whom it jointly ran Yeezy, after a public outcry over antisemitic and racist remarks by the US rapper and fashion designer.

Late last year, anonymous employees accused Adidas of turning a blind eye to West’s alleged inappropriate internal behaviour. They claimed senior managers were aware that the rapper played pornography to staff in meetings and showed an intimate picture of his ex-wife Kim Kardashian in job interviews. An internal investigation by Adidas did not find evidence for the gravest allegations but uncovered “partially inappropriate behaviour”.

Earlier this year, Adidas clashed with the Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation as it tried to stop the action group from using a three-stripes logo that it argued resembled Adidas’s trademark. The German brand backed down after another public backlash.

Adidas chair Thomas Rabe praised Rajkumar’s effort in “fostering a deeper culture of inclusion and creating better leadership accountability”. The company named Michelle Robertson, senior vice-president workplaces and global functions, as her interim successor.