The Policies Are Nearly Gone. The Boards Aren’t. Yet.
Bloomberg reported this week that 61 S&P 100 companies have eliminated explicit diversity criteria for director searches since 2023.
We land in the same place. We’re just far pickier about what counted as a policy in the first place.
PeopleReturn flags a board diversity policy only when the language creates a requirement about the candidate pool: women and people of color must be included among the candidates considered. A company that says its board values diversity has not adopted a policy. A company that lists race, gender identity, ethnicity, sexual orientation, culture and nationality among the many things it weighs has not adopted a policy either. It has written a sentence.
The distinction decides who counts as having retreated, and the answer is not who you’d expect.
Goldman Sachs was among the companies cited as dropping diversity criteria. Its old governance guidelines said director candidates were evaluated on:
Diversity of viewpoints, background, work and other experiences (including military service), and other demographics, such as race, gender identity, ethnicity, sexual orientation, culture and nationality.
The current version stops after:
Diversity of viewpoints, backgrounds, work and other experiences.
Less disclosure, certainly. But nobody was ever required to be included in anything. Goldman never had a board diversity policy by our standard, which means the activists who claimed it as a win claimed credit for deleting a clause.
The distinction is clearer among companies that actually did bind themselves. AMD’s policy states that the initial list from which new management-supported directors are chosen “shall include qualified candidates from a variety of racial/ethnic and gender backgrounds,” and instructs third-party search firms to do the same. Walmart’s is blunter: “It is the policy of the Board to include, and to instruct search firms to include, women and ethnically and racially diverse candidates” in the pool.
Neither has removed it.
Applying the narrower definition does not make the retreat look smaller. It makes it look worse.
Roughly three-quarters of explicit candidate-pool policies have disappeared in two years.
We are not the only ones getting a number this small. Spencer Stuart tracks Rooney Rule-type provisions, functionally the same candidate-pool requirement, and its 2026 Board Index puts the S&P 500 share at 12%, down from 58% a year earlier. Our independently coded S&P 500 figure is 11.6%.
Two firms, two methodologies, one standard: a policy has to require something. That produces a very different result from a methodology that counts a company because it mentioned demographic characteristics.
Eleven S&P 100 companies in our 2026 sample still have a policy.
These are not companies flying under the radar. Nvidia, Walmart, Costco and Home Depot are about as visible as American corporations get. Their policies are still in force, which makes it harder to explain the broader retreat as something companies simply had no choice about.
The more interesting question is what happened to the boards themselves.
Almost nothing.
Women and people of color held 49.6% of S&P 500 directorships in 2024. They held 49.6% in 2025. This year they hold 49.7%.
Three years of policy demolition, one tenth of a point.
Then look at who is actually joining.
The reversal is sharpest for women. They were 40.1% of new S&P 500 directors in 2023, then 36.6% in 2024, 28.8% in 2025 and 24.9% this year. People of color have followed a shallower version of the same path, from 28.2% of new directors in 2023 to 20.3% in 2026.
Resist the tidy version of this story, because the data does not support it.
New-director diversity peaked at 68.0% in 2021 and fell more than ten points the following year, well before the policy language started disappearing and before we have comparable policy data. Our policy series begins in 2024. The decline did not start when the policies went away.
Whatever effect the policies had, they at least imposed a procedural floor: the candidate pool had to include women and people of color. Companies removed that floor at precisely the moment the number underneath was falling fastest. From 2024 to 2026, candidate-pool policies fell by roughly 75%, while the share of new directors who were women or people of color fell from 50.3% to 39.0%.
The mechanism wasn’t dismantled after the numbers stopped moving. It was dismantled on the way down.
Other forces point the same direction. Companies are appointing fewer directors overall, and Spencer Stuart reports that current and former CEOs now account for 37% of new independent directors, the highest share since 2012. That pool remains overwhelmingly White and male. A board that increasingly recruits from sitting and retired CEOs is making a demographic choice whether or not it writes one down.
Which brings the flat 49.7% back into focus.
Board composition is a lagging indicator by construction. Today’s 49.7% is the accumulated result of years of recruiting decisions, including years when candidate-pool policies were standard and better than half of every incoming class was a woman or a person of color.
The 49.7% tells you what boards look like. The 39.0% tells you which way they’re moving.
Today’s board reflects years of appointments. Today’s incoming class tells you what’s coming next.
What Counts as Getting Hurt at Work?
Last week, we spent an unreasonable amount of time trying to answer what should be a simple question: how many people get hurt or killed working for America’s largest companies?
Turns out we may have skipped a step.
On July 21, the Fifth Circuit ruled that OSHA could not require Exxon Mobil to record an employee’s work-related PTSD as an occupational illness. The employee had twice accompanied firefighters into a burning building at Exxon’s Baytown, Texas complex to help close valves feeding the fire. He later reported developing post-traumatic stress disorder. Exxon did not record it. His union brought that to OSHA, which issued an other-than-serious recordkeeping citation carrying a $691 penalty.
The court did not dispute whether the PTSD was work-related. It ruled that it was not the kind of “illness” Congress authorized OSHA to track.
When Congress passed the Occupational Safety and Health Act in 1970, the panel reasoned, “illness” meant a condition of the body rather than the mind, and it pointed to dictionaries from the period to say so. OSHA has required employers to record work-related mental illnesses for roughly 25 years. But after the Supreme Court’s 2024 decision in Loper Bright ended Chevron deference, the court said it was obligated to identify the best reading of the statute rather than defer to the agency’s.
The decision also went further than the citation. The panel vacated the underlying regulation, 29 C.F.R. § 1904.5(b)(2)(ix), rather than limiting relief to Exxon. Its reading of the statute binds Texas, Louisiana and Mississippi. The vacatur arguably binds everyone. Employment counsel are currently split on whether employers outside the Fifth Circuit still have to record these cases at all, and OSHA’s window to seek rehearing runs into early September.
So, as of this week:
- An employee burns his hand fighting the fire. Recordable.
- An employee develops a respiratory condition from the smoke and misses work. Recordable.
- An employee walks into the same burning building and comes out with PTSD. Not recordable in three states, and possibly not anywhere.
None of this is a finding about whether the harm happened. Recordability was never a clinical judgment. It is a legal test, and the OSHA 300 log has never been an inventory of occupational harm, only of the harm the statute reaches. What moved in July was the boundary.
That has a practical consequence for anyone comparing companies on safety performance. OSHA records are maintained establishment by establishment. If the decision ultimately produces different recording obligations inside and outside the Fifth Circuit, the same employer could be recording mental illness under one definition at an Ohio facility and another at a Texas facility. Roll those establishments up to the company level — as investors, researchers and companies themselves routinely do — and geography has become another source of comparability risk.
Two otherwise identical workplaces could produce different reported safety data because they sit on opposite sides of a circuit boundary.
Last week’s problem was that America’s workplace safety data are fragmented, incomplete and difficult to reconcile across sources. This one runs inside the individual filer.
Before you can count workplace harm, you have to decide what harm counts.
That definition just got narrower. Nobody is quite sure where.
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You Get 100 Guesses
If you asked 100 people to name the S&P 500 company with the highest five-year total shareholder return, how many would guess Comfort Systems USA?
One?
The mechanical, electrical and plumbing contractor joined the index in December 2025. Over the past five years its shareholders have earned 2,381.6%. Second place on that list is Micron, at 1,079.1%. Comfort Systems more than doubles it.
Over ten years, the return is 6,139.8%, trailing only Nvidia, AMD, and Micron.
The company went public in 1997 as a rollup of 12 contractors. It now owns more than 50 operating companies across 197 locations, generally leaving its operating companies locally managed while supplying the balance sheet and back office of a national organization.
It also happens to sell exactly what the AI boom suddenly needs in volume: HVAC, electrical, plumbing and modular building systems. Technology work, mostly data centers, accounted for 58% of first-half 2026 revenue, up from 40% a year earlier. Backlog reached $14.1 billion at the end of the second quarter, 73% higher than a year ago.
It is not the only one. Quanta Services (683.9%) and EMCOR Group (603.3%) also rank in the top 20 of the same five-year list. Three specialty contractors, all of them in the business of physically assembling infrastructure.
The interesting part is what limits them. Comfort Systems has more than doubled its workforce since 2020, from roughly 11,100 employees to nearly 23,000, and management still describes labor as the perennial pinch point on growth. Not orders. Not capital. Electricians and pipefitters.
Turns out the picks and shovels of the AI boom include a lot of actual picks and shovels. Someone has to hold them.
What we’re reading:
- Forget slides and ping-pong, the best staff perks are time and money Companies are spending small fortunes trying to make themselves attractive employers and then discovering some of the things they offer are not necessarily what their staff value most. (The Times)
- The Traffic Light Effect in ESG Ratings ESG ratings increasingly govern index construction and investment mandates, creating a conflict of interest for investor-paid raters: because rating changes trigger rebalancing costs for subscribers, raters face pressure to favor stability over timeliness. (Harvard Business School)
- Meet the CEOs walking (and talking) with staff At e.l.f Beauty, a cosmetics company, chair and chief executive Tarang Amin started sending weekly emails to his 700 staff at the start of the pandemic, to help people feel more connected. More than 300 emails later, he’s still writing, addressing them to “e.l.f Beauty Teammates”. Tarang says: “An email is simple, conversational, and invites dialogue. I end almost every email with ‘I’d love to hear from you’ — and I respond to every single one.” (Financial Times)
- Mamdani Takes On Amazon in New Battle Over New York’s Delivery Workers New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani has fired a new salvo in his push to take on big business on behalf of low-paid workers, backing a bill that would force Amazon, FedEx and other companies to employ delivery workers instead of using subcontractors. (Wall Street Journal) and New Jersey sues Amazon alleging poor pay and conditions for drivers Amazon used its dominance to impose low pay and poor conditions on thousands of New Jersey workers who deliver for the company via its Delivery Service Partner program, the state alleged in the lawsuit, opens new tab filed in federal court in Newark, New Jersey. (Reuters)
- ‘Disposable Workers: The Transformation of Employment’ A profound shift is reshaping employment culture in the U.S. — a shift that MIT Sloan School of Management emeritus professor Paul Osterman says is happening at the expense of a large swath of the U.S. workforce: Increasingly, employers are bypassing long-term, mutually beneficial relationships with employees in favor of short-term contract work. (MIT Sloan School of Management)
- What Keeps Fast-Growth CEOs Up at Night? It Comes Down to 1 Leadership Problem Across roughly 1,536 usable open-ended responses about what keeps CEOs up at night, one of the clearest themes was even more human: people, hiring, leadership, and culture. (Inc.)
- Do CEOs Trust Their Boards? RRA’s Leadership Confidence Index Finds an Emerging Gap In today’s unpredictable environment of economic volatility, AI disruption, and geopolitical instability, there’s another emerging threat to organizational health: a widening confidence gap between CEOs and their boards. (Russell Reynolds)
- Employees from Lower-Class Backgrounds Negotiate Less—and Face More Backlash Individuals from lower social-class backgrounds negotiate less often than their higher-class counterparts, and this gap is associated with lower pay and fewer opportunities for advancement. This is one way the “class ceiling” gets built. (Harvard Business Review)
- From assistance to execution: How enterprises put AI to work Organizations are expanding both where they use AI and what they ask it to do. Enterprise AI is moving from assistance to execution, yet not all firms are making that transition at the same pace. (OpenAI)