Dow has named Karen S. Carter CEO, effective July 1. She will replace Jim Fitterling, who has led Dow since before its separation from DowDuPont in 2019, and become the first Black woman to lead a major US chemical company.
Carter has been Dow’s chief operating officer since 2024 and has co-anchored Dow’s quarterly analyst conference calls with Fitterling and Dow’s chief financial officer, Jeff Tate. She has also led Dow’s largest business segment, Packaging and Specialty Plastics, since 2022.
Karen S. Carter Credit:
Dow
Carter joined Dow in 1994 as a sales specialist in its plastic-film business. She had earlier interned for Dow as a marketing student at Howard University. She has held positions of increasing responsibility in Dow’s plastics businesses over the years and was named the company’s first chief inclusion officer in 2018.
Later in 2018 she told the Disrupt Yourself Podcast (PDF) about a speech that then-CEO Andrew N. Liveris made when he announced the role. “He acknowledged that our company, like many other US-based companies, that we were falling behind in the effort to build more diversity in our workforce but also eliminate bias in our actions,” Carter recalled. “And I’ll tell you what: that honesty was extremely refreshing. But he was also extremely compelling in his conviction that our company needed to reflect the world we were becoming and not the world we left behind.”
In addition to her degree from Howard, Carter has a master’s degree in international business from DePaul University.
Fitterling will continue to serve on Dow’s board as executive chair. He has led Dow through tumultuous times, including the COVID-19 pandemic and the Russian invasion of Ukraine. But his back-to-basics approach to the job contrasted with that of his predecessor, Liveris, who pursued audacious and transformative transactions such as the acquisition of Rohm and Haas and the merger with DuPont.
Fitterling had also been, like Carter, Dow’s chief operating officer.
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