Investors are pouring money into initial public offerings like it’s 2021, with this season alone unleashing several new tickers, including FIG, BLSH, and soon, STUB. For some, the surge is a welcome sign of renewed optimism after tariff-related chaos in the spring threatened a promised IPO revival.
But an analysis of recent IPO-related filings shows that women leaders are largely missing from the boards and executive teams at the vast majority of new public companies, despite years of calls for more diversity in corporate leadership. The data may even be an early signal of future losses for executive women, as DEI, already facing a backlash, is abandoned or sidelined, especially in the tech industry.
Damion Rallis, cofounder of board data firm Free Float Analytics, combed through information about 61 companies that filed IPO-related documents in the first two weeks of August. He found that nearly 88% of the firms (most of which were in tech) had only one or no women on their board of directors, while 93% had only one or no women in their C-suite. Rallis is now calling this the “Bro-PO market,” and said his findings were “crazy.”
“We’ve given up our ideals. We’ve just given up,” he said on Free Float’s Business Pants podcast.
Only seven of the 61 companies Rallis examined had two or more women on their boards, while only four listed two or more women executives. In total, women represented only 12% of the 349 directors and 11% of 205 executives identified in the filings. StubHub listed one female executive on its team of five, and one female director on a board of seven. Bullish listed two executive leaders, both men, and one woman on its six-person board.
For reference, women represent about 30% of board members at Russell 3000 companies, according to recent studies, and 29% of C-suite roles, according to a 2024 McKinsey survey.
In recent years, corporate boards have made gender and racial diversity a central focus of recruitment efforts, especially after Nasdaq issued a rule that said listed companies must disclose their board gender and diversity statistics. That directive was set to expand: Eventually, it would have imposed minimum diversity requirements or asked companies to explain why their boards weren’t diverse. However, that effort was shut down in late 2024 by a federal appeals court that decided Nasdaq had overstepped its statutory authority when it set the policy.
In 2020, Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon declared that “IPOs are a pivotal moment for firms,” as he described his bank’s then-landmark pledge not to take companies public if their boards were entirely male. But the company abandoned that promise this year, citing “legal developments related to board diversity requirements,” my colleague Emma Hinchliffe reported in February. “We continue to believe that successful boards benefit from diverse backgrounds and perspectives, and we will encourage them to take this approach,” Goldman told Fortune at the time.
The Goldman Sachs rollback was one of many widely seen as a response to a long-running war on “woke” corporate policies that’s now backed by President Trump.
Despite these policy shifts, most investors have come to expect companies to form diverse boards and C-suites as part of optimizing a leadership team. The bar is lower for “starter boards” of newly IPO’d companies, says Matt Moscardi, cofounder of Free Float Analytics. But he says he was still surprised that today’s fledgling public companies are not even nodding at market norms. Instead, they’re leaving out 50% of humanity.
“You’d expect them to look and say, ‘Well, you’re going to IPO, what do other publicly traded companies look like?’” Moscardi told Fortune, “and there is basically no effort to do that.”
