September 28, 2025
According to a new report, corporate boards are again dominated by white men.
The Trump administration has been a boon for white men who direct S&P 500 companies, per newly available data from research firm ISS-Corporate, according to Axios. In the data, they note that the percentages of both women and ethnic minority groups who lead those companies are down by 9 percentage points and 24 percentage points, respectively.
Trump’s aggressive stance on eliminating diversity, equity, and inclusion at the federal level has led to a domino effect in the business and tech worlds, leading companies like Meta, Disney, and Target to either recast or end their DEI positions and departments in an effort to avoid the scrutiny of an overzealous and increasingly authoritarian federal government.
According to Bloomberg, recruiters have told them that efforts in prior years to broaden the net of qualified individuals to fill those positions have fallen by the wayside in favor of the “male, stale and pale” leader that had fallen out of favor during the post-George Floyd DEI emergence of 2020.
Per Robert Travis, a managing partner at executive recruiter Boyden who works on director searches, “What was grossly underappreciated five years ago — a candidate that was male, stale and pale — is now very much at the table to be considered against any and all other candidates.”
How companies explain this move is that they are looking for candidates with previous experience running companies or big business units, which basically means they are prioritizing white men, and among that group, they especially value current or former CEOs, which, again, tend to be white men.
Although the directors and recruiters who they interviewed pointed out that the Trump administration isn’t technically guiding what they do, the atmosphere around DEI has absolutely been transformed.
According to Ellen Zane, who is on the nomination-and-governance committee at Boston Scientific Corp and is the former chief of the Tufts Medical Center in Boston, the changed atmosphere is undeniable.
“There were large shareholders that would absolutely, positively ding a company if they disagreed with how you had fulfilled your diversity goals,” Zane told Bloomberg. “Then all of a sudden, it completely changed.”
As Joan Williams, a law professor and the founding director of the Equality Action Center at UC Law San Francisco, told The Guardian in March, “We all want a meritocracy, but too often we don’t have them. There is one group in professional workplaces where over 90% believe they are working in meritocracies – and that’s white men. Every other group has significantly less confidence that they are working in meritocracies because they feel that they are being held to a different standard. We did 22 DEI experiments inside companies. One company was horrified to find that they were hiring white men who had lower ratings than women and people of color who weren’t hired,” Williams said.
Akilah Cadet, the author of “White Supremacy Is All Around,” indicated that although the brief period between 2020 and 2023 was good for her professionally, once companies decided to move on, her prospects dried up as quickly as they had appeared.
“The amount of money I made starting May 2020 until about 2023 – I’ve never made so much money in my entire life. I’ve laid off my staff. I have a much smaller team. I’m being punished as a result of people no longer wanting to care about people they should have been caring about in the first place,” Cadet reflected.
She continued, “Imagine that you were working for a company where you had tools in place, access to an executive coach, a programme that got you into a leadership track. These individuals had support and were told they were valued. Heterosexual, non-disabled, cisgendered white men and women have always had that [validation] in the workplace. And it will still be there after the attack on DEI, but it won’t be for people who don’t identify as those groups. That’s the bigger unfortunate thing that’s happening here: ‘You mattered – and guess what? I’m going to remind you that you don’t matter again.’”
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