Historically, corporate board rooms have been mostly white and mostly male. Yet the trend started shifting in the 1970s, in part due to gains from the civil rights era and pro-diversity efforts by activists and business groups.
I have been monitoring the degree of diversity in the corporate and political worlds for decades. One useful diversity metric is the percentage of boardroom members who are not white men.
And for the third year in a row, white men did not hold the majority of seats on the boards of America’s 50 largest corporations, according to my analysis of the most recent Fortune 500 list. However, the share of white men nonetheless ticked up after a two-year decline.
But knowing the white man/nonwhite man board split in itself is a blunt tool. It doesn’t tell us the nature of the current diversity, how it is related to the broader political climate, and what can be learned about diversity by looking at who the 2025 corporate directors were.
Patterns in the data
Whereas about a decade ago, white men held two-thirds of the seats on the top 50 Fortune boards, in 2023, for the first time, they held fewer than 50%. In 2024, that number dropped to 48.4%, but this year it climbed back to 49.7%.
Since white men make up about 31% of the U.S. population, they still have been very much overrepresented in all three years.
As the percentage of seats held by white men rose from 2024 to 2025, however, the percentage held by white women dropped, from 25% to 24.5%. Other researchers found this same pattern for the entire Fortune 500.
The percentage of seats held by Black people also dropped, from 15% to 14.2%, and likewise those held by Hispanic people, from 6.1% to 5.9%. Meanwhile, the percentage of seats held by Asian people rose slightly, from 5.6% to 5.7%.
The education factor
The large majority of the men and women with Asian backgrounds who held 33 seats on the top 50 Fortune boards in 2025 were born outside the United States, did undergraduate work in their home countries, and then came to the U.S. to attend graduate school.
Most of the Hispanic directors were similarly born outside the country, and many of them did undergraduate or graduate work – or both – in the U.S.
Education matters for future diversity monitoring in part because of the Trump administration’s efforts to make it much harder for noncitizens to come to the U.S. for higher education.
Indeed, denying access to Asian and Hispanic people who wish to study in the U.S. could well, over time, diminish the pipeline to the corporate suite, and it could decrease the number of Asian and Hispanic corporate directors as well.
The politics beyond some notable board changes
It is revealing to look at some of the people who left boards and the appointments of others – changes that resulted in this year’s drop in diversity.
For example, Meta added five people to its board: four white men and an Egyptian American woman. One of the white men was Dana White, the CEO of the Ultimate Fighting Championship and a longtime and currently active Trump supporter.
The woman that Meta added to its board is Dina Powell McCormick. She was deputy national security adviser in Trump’s first term and is married to Dave McCormick, a Republican financier who is currently a U.S. senator from Pennsylvania.
With the addition of White, Powell McCormick and three other white men, the Meta board went from 50% white males in 2024 to 60% in 2025, and it added two Trump supporters with close connections to the president. In late December 2025, Powell McCormick resigned from her position to become Meta’s president and vice chair.
Some other notable changes in diversity from 2024 to 2025 took place on the boards of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
Because the Federal Housing Finance Agency regulates these two companies, in 2025 the Trump administration’s hostility toward diversity, equity and inclusion, or DEI, appeared to have a direct effect on the level of diversity on these two boards. In January 2025, Trump nominated William Pulte, a Trump donor, to become the director of the FHFA.
Pulte swiftly got rid of some women directors, Black directors and an Asian director. As a result, the percentage of white male directors on those two boards increased from 40% in 2024 to 65% in 2025. Notably, however, among the new appointees to the board were a Black man, another man whose mother is Iranian and whose father is Pakistani, and a man of Spanish ancestry whose parents were Turkish immigrants.
Trump’s second-term cabinet – which includes five white women, a Black man, and a Hispanic woman – included far less diversity than the cabinets of Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden, but twice as much diversity as Trump’s first cabinet. Trump has shown himself to be open to some diversity as long as the diverse appointments – in line with his general policy on recruitment – are sufficiently willing to support him. Similarly, Pulte’s changes decreased diversity while at the same time including some people from diverse backgrounds who were loyal to Trump.
The ironies of elite diversity
All of that ties into a subject I have explored in three editions of a book I co-authored with Bill Domhoff, “Diversity in the Power Elite.” In it, we have looked at what we have called “the ironies of diversity.”
One central irony of diversity is that as a small number of people from previously excluded groups are granted entry into the power elite, the processes by which they are chosen and their very presence provide justification for the continuation of the status quo when it comes to power and the distribution of wealth.
The continued selections of some directors who provide diversity on the boards of the top 50 Fortune companies are part of this process, as is Trump’s surprisingly diverse Cabinet.
The fear among those pushing for greater diversity among corporate leadership is that the data for 2025 might be the beginning of a longer declining trend.
Richie Zweigenhaft, Emeritus Professor of Psychology, Guilford College
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
