When leaders at Mogul, a recruiting site for diverse executives, began planning a new report on boardroom diversity at Fortune 500 companies, they hoped to ultimately rank the 100 most diverse boards.
That turned out to be a fool’s errand. “It quickly became evident that it doesn’t exist. There aren’t 100 diverse boards,” Namisha Bahl, chief marketing officer at Mogul, told Fortune.
In fact, it could be decades before a top 100 ranking is feasible. Mogul found that at the rate of change in boardroom diversity today, the boards of the world’s leading companies won’t have gender and racial parity until 2074.
Mogul’s data echoes that of other recent diversity reports. It shows that today’s Fortune 500 boards are predominantly white (78%) and male (69%) and led by chairs who are also white (91%) and male (82%). Of the roughly 30% of women’s seats, white women hold 75%.
One reason these diversity statistics change little from year to year is that board tenures are long—averaging 9.7 years at larger companies—and boards tend to reelect sitting members automatically. However, that habit could change as shareholders and investors pressure companies to be more transparent about boardroom diversity. Nasdaq now mandates that listed companies disclose board-level diversity, while some organizations have opted to add seats, creating immediate openings for talent from underrepresented groups.
But directors still tend to recruit from within their networks, reinforcing existing imbalances. Many appointees already sit on other boards, which explains why 746 people control 30% of the more than 5,400 available Fortune 500 board seats. The data on this smaller cohort of influential directors reveal that power remains concentrated among white executives here, too, and few non-white directors are breaking into the inner circle.
Here’s a look at the ethnic and racial diversity among board members who sit on two boards:
Among the 132 directors who sit on more than three boards, 35% are people of color.
The problem with this imbalance is that board decisions affect millions of employees, shareholders, and customers, Bahl said. “If you have individuals serving on multiple boards, that one person’s impact is exponential. It is immeasurable.”
One might think that a snapshot of new board members would be more representative of the U.S. workforce, given much talk from company heads about the moral and strategic need for board diversity. But Mogul found that most new board members are white men (68%), echoing past findings from other organizations.
Among all directors, Black men and Black women command the second-highest share of Fortune 500 board seats at 7% and 5%, respectively. Latinx and Hispanic, Asian, Indian, and Middle Eastern executives are still barely represented. The researchers did not find any Indigenous Americans on a Fortune 500 board.
The report’s authors acknowledge that important dimensions of diversity—including socioeconomic background, LGBTQ+ representation, and the full gender spectrum—are missing from the analysis. However, publicly available information about board directors is limited.
