Nearly a quarter of the Russell 3000 has now filed, and the shift is clear: board-level disclosure is continuing to pull back—both in depth and consistency.
Our board transparency score—which measures the share of demographic characteristics companies disclose—previously included LGBTQ+ and veteran status.
With the Nasdaq diversity mandate no longer in effect, disclosure expectations have shifted materially. In 2023, 41.6% of Russell 3000 companies reported aggregate LGBTQ+ board representation; so far in 2026, that figure is just 4%.
As a result, we’ve adjusted the score to focus on gender, race/ethnicity, and intersectional diversity, both in aggregate and at the individual director level.
After a sharp decline last year, average disclosure levels have stabilized, but remain roughly in line with 2021 levels, effectively erasing several years of progress.
In 2024, nearly 93% of Russell 3000 companies disclosed at least one quantitative board diversity metric. So far this year, more than 40% have disclosed nothing.
The drop-off is broad-based across core metrics (Russell 3000, 2024 → 2026 YTD):
- Aggregate gender: 90.9%->55.2%
- Aggregate race/ethnicity: 87.4%->47.7%
- Aggregate overall (gender and race/ethnicity): 78.7%->34.5%
Even after last year’s pullback, the direction of change remains one-sided: far more companies are reducing disclosure than increasing it.
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There are still pockets of consistency. 12.4% of companies reporting so far disclose gender and race/ethnicity for each individual director, slightly up from 11.6% last year, but well below 20.1% in 2024.
Only one company—IDEX Corp.—has maintained full disclosure across all measured characteristics for four consecutive years.
Diverse slate policies continue to fade: just 12.4% of companies reporting so far have retained them, down from 18.6% last year and 35.7% in 2024.
One example is Intel, which is surprising considering it is partly owned by the US government:
The Board is committed to being composed of directors with broad and complementary perspectives, skills, experiences and backgrounds to enable the Board to represent stockholders’ interests. In 2014, the Board formally adopted its commitment to actively seek women and minority candidates, and those with a breadth of backgrounds and skills, to add to the pool from which Board nominees are considered, and annually assess its effectiveness in this regard as part of its self-evaluation process.
As sustainability reporting season ramps up in April, the key question is whether this pullback extends beyond proxies and 10-Ks.
Last year, many companies removed HCM and DEI data from filings but continued to disclose in sustainability reports. If that changes, investors will be left with even less structured information to evaluate workforce and governance risks.
That’s exactly the gap we’re focused on this proxy season—helping teams quickly surface what’s changed, what’s missing, and where it matters for voting and engagement.
What we’re reading:
- Finding the Best Place to Work: A Look at Careers at More Than 1,700 Companies It hasn’t been easy to find an employer that’s a good fit. Job seekers often have little more to guide them than word-of-mouth, social-media chatter and websites offering glimpses of pay and benefits. Many end up churning through jobs or finding themselves stuck in a career cul-de-sac. Now, a new analysis provides a potential road map. It points to companies best at hiring early-career candidates, moving employees up through the ranks and providing a stable home base for a career—both overall, and for specific roles. (Wall Street Journal)
- The return-to-the-office trend backfires Many business leaders think that a stricter return-to-office policy will cause a surge in productivity. But in reality, the data tell a different story. Across practitioner reports and peer-reviewed research, including a new report from the Institute for Corporate Productivity, organizations that commit to highly flexible models, including remote-first, report strong output, healthier engagement, and faster growth than mandate-driven peers. (The Hill) and The State of Remote Work in 2026: Data, Trends, and What’s Actually Working In February 2026, Stanford economist Nicholas Bloom — who has been tracking remote work patterns through the WFH Research project since 2020 — published his most comprehensive findings yet. The headline: after six years of data covering over 30,000 employees across industries and countries, the remote work question has been largely answered. Hybrid work (2-3 days in office per week) produces outcomes equivalent to full-time office work on almost every measurable dimension — productivity, innovation, employee satisfaction, and retention — while delivering substantial benefits in reduced real estate costs, improved work-life balance, and access to broader talent pools. (Gray Group International)
- How Leaders Can Build a High-Agency Culture When Larry Culp became CEO of General Electric in October 2018, he was the first outsider to lead the company in its 126-year history. He inherited a crisis that looked terminal. GE’s stock had plummeted, falling 45% in 2017 and another 58% in 2018. The company’s debt load far exceeded its market capitalization, and its credit rating was sliding toward junk. The corporation that had been worth $594 billion in 2000, making it the most valuable company in the world, had become, by most Wall Street accounts, a slow-motion collapse. Today, GE Aerospace has a $190 billion backlog and posted 21% revenue growth in 2025. Culp’s contract has been extended through 2027. What happened at GE was not just a financial turnaround. It was a belief intervention. (Harvard Business Review)
- Bosses of AI Users Are Destroying Big Chance at Worker Engagement Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley’s Haas School of Business spent eight months studying what happened when workers at a tech company got access to AI tools. They found the workers moved faster, took on broader tasks, and extended their hours into evenings and early mornings. Nobody told them to, and the company didn’t mandate the use of AI. These workers did more because they wanted to, because the work had become worth doing and because AI made it, in the words of the researchers, “intrinsically rewarding.” The workers described feeling like they had a “partner” that helped them push through their workload. They didn’t do more in less time — they did more in more time, of their own volition. (Bloomberg)
- Companies are pouring billions into AI and cutting training budgets. It’s a losing strategy Businesses are pouring billions into AI to boost productivity and cut costs—and to fund it, they’re slashing hiring, training, and employee support. Headcount isn’t safe either: as Jack Dorsey’s Block recently demonstrated, a growing number of executives are citing AI as justification for substantial layoffs. That approach may lift short-term margins. But it is a dangerous long-term strategy—and the data makes clear why. (Fortune)
- How Morningstar’s CEO Drives Relentless Execution Many investors rely on Morningstar for independent financial analysis and insights, but few people are familiar with the company behind the ratings. From Morningstar’s origins rating mutual funds, the company has expanded its product line, customer base, and global footprint and realized a tenfold increase in revenues and profits between 2005 and 2025. Morningstar’s culture, CEO Kunal Kapoor said, “has been one of the ingredients that has allowed us to be successful, and I think will continue to allow us to be successful.” (MIT Sloan Management Review)
- Leaders Underestimate the Value of Employee Joy Company leaders have long claimed that people are their greatest asset. Yet many still design work as if employees were just one of many operational inputs, leaving their greatest assets feeling dissatisfied and unmotivated. Companies have become masters at understanding their customers. They map customer journeys, study their behaviors, and use predictive analytics to anticipate their needs with astonishing precision. But when it comes to understanding their employees—the very people who create those customer experiences—most organizations still rely on intuition, surface-level data, or generic, infrequent surveys. (Harvard Business Review)