Black Women CEOs in the S&P 500 Double
Last week, Dow announced that Karen Carter, the current President of Packaging and Specialty Plastics, will succeed Jim Fitterling as CEO on July 1st.
She will become the first woman to lead the company in its 104-year history.
Her promotion will make her the 49th woman currently leading an S&P 500 company. More notably, it will double the number of Black women serving as CEOs in the index—from one to two.
Zooming out to the Russell 1000, her appointment will make her the third Black CEO currently leading a company in the index. Across the broader Russell 3000, there are currently five Black women CEOs; she will become the sixth.
Black women have had only marginally better representation in the CFO role: the Russell 3000 currently has just ten Black women CFOs.
That underscores how narrow the executive pipeline remains. As political and legal pressure mounts against corporate diversity initiatives—and even longstanding programs like the National Football League’s Rooney Rule face scrutiny—the opportunities that helped expand executive pathways may become harder to sustain.
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New Veteran Data Available
We talk often about EEO-1 data—the intersectional workforce disclosures (gender and race/ethnicity) that companies report to the government and, in some cases, publish voluntarily. Until now, there has been no comparable company-level dataset for veterans.
Federal contractors and subcontractors with more than $150,000 in annual contracts are required to file data showing how many veterans they employ and hire, broken out by location and job category. Recently, that information became publicly available through the U.S. Department of Labor Open Data Portal.
Historically, anyone trying to assess veteran hiring had to rely on sparse, inconsistent company disclosures or third-party lists such as “Best for Vets” and similar recognition programs.
This opens the door to much deeper analysis—not just veteran attraction and retention, but hiring and workforce trends across job categories at public companies, many of which do not even disclose total annual hiring figures.
Proxy Season Update
You might ask how much could have changed between last Friday and this Friday. The answer: quite a bit.
There have been 354 proxy statements published by Russell 3000 companies this week alone—and that total increased by seven while I was writing this thanks to the usual Friday afternoon filing rush.
The broader trend remains intact: transparency is down across the board, with the sharpest pullbacks occurring at smaller companies. Larger issuers are still more likely to face investor pressure for disclosure through engagement and proxy voting, which appears to be helping support relatively better reporting levels.
Here is an updated look at our board disclosure scores over time. The story is hard to miss: rapid improvement from 2019 through 2024, followed by a sharp reversal in 2025 that has continued into 2026.
If you’re looking for deeper cuts of the data—by index, size tier, exchange, sector, or specific disclosure metric—or broader governance signals during proxy season, we’d be happy to share more.
What we’re reading:
- The power has swung back to employers—and workers are paying for it in benefits, flexibility, and leverage Employers have regained their power over employees, and the effects are already showing up. During the peak of the Great Resignation in November 2021, 4.5 million workers left their jobs voluntarily. As of last month, that number was about 3 million as employees hesitated to quit at a time when job searches can drag on for months. Workers’ optimism for finding a job is lower today than during the pandemic in 2020, according to a report by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. (Fortune)
- DEI After Backlash: From Compliance to Governance Corporate diversity efforts in the United States are widely perceived to be in retreat. This chapter argues that this perception misstates the legal reality. While political pressure and regulatory signaling have intensified, the underlying legal framework governing diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) remains largely unchanged. Organizations are responding to a shift from adjudication to deterrence, where investigations and signaling shape behavior before courts intervene. This chapter offers a governance-based framework for navigating this environment. (SMU Dedman School of Law)
- Has the Era of the Mega-Layoff Arrived? Snap is laying off 16% of its staff. Block lopped off 40% of its workforce. Oracle, meanwhile, is shedding thousands of employees, after Amazon.com cut about 30,000 in a matter of months. Welcome to the era of the mega-layoff. In Silicon Valley and beyond, companies that are cutting staff are doing it with a big ax. Instead of laying off people in more incremental—and less disruptive—waves, employers are seizing on the potential financial upsides of severing swaths of their workforces at once. (Wall Street Journal)
- In culture war ‘detente,’ some US companies loosen rules on workplace free speech In the cancel-culture wars over freedom of speech in the U.S. workplace, a truce is taking shape at some employers. At least four public companies, including Mastercard, Regions Financial and Entergy, have tweaked their codes of conduct to give employees more space to express themselves such as on social media, according to executives, investors and disclosures seen by Reuters. (Reuters)
- Hate it or love it, is DEI a distraction? (NPR) and Did D.E.I. Go Too Far? In recent years, diversity, equity and inclusion policies have shifted from an internal workplace initiative to a public reckoning. Critics argue that it has strayed from its original purpose, reshaping institutions in ways that are performative at best and discriminatory at worst. President Trump has made dismantling it a central political project, targeting efforts across government, academia and the arts. Even some on the left have begun to question what D.E.I. has become. But the most revealing critique may come from the people who built it. (NY Times)
- NFL’s Rooney Rule Meets Biggest Challenge in Trump’s DEI Crackdown The most-recognizable diversity policy in sports is facing the biggest challenge in its history. Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier, who has been endorsed by President Donald Trump, is calling for the end of the National Football League’s Rooney Rule, a provision that requires teams to interview at least two minority candidates for head coaching jobs. He says the rule “brazenly violates Florida law” and he wants the league to drop enforcement of it by May 1. (Bloomberg)
- CEOs downplay staff discontent, leaving HR to manage the fallout Global employee engagement has slumped to its lowest level in five years, but many chief executives still aren’t losing sleep over the risk of a restless workforce. Gallup’s 2026 State of the Global Workplace report found that only 20% of employees worldwide were engaged at work in 2025, down from a peak of 23% in 2022 and the weakest result since 2020. Low engagement and active disengagement together cost the world economy an estimated US$10 trillion in lost productivity last year, or around nine per cent of global GDP. (HRD)
- Companies pause DEI objectives when hiring lawyers U.S. companies are backing down from demanding that law firms that they work with meet certain objectives, acquiescing to objections mandated by President Donald Trump regarding diversity, equity and inclusion in the legal profession. According to firm leaders who spoke to Bloomberg Law on the condition of anonymity, companies still inquire about a firm’s demographic data; however, most have backed away from making decisions about payment or retaining counsel based on specific metrics. (ABA Journal)
- 10 companies that have said they’re doing AI-related layoffs Worries about AI one day replacing human workers have intensified recently — and as it turns out, that future may be here. A number of companies have recently announced cuts staff and cited AI efficiencies as a major rationale. (Business Insider)
- Federal Targets, First Settlement Underscore Corporate DEI Risks The Justice Department has kept its word to go after corporate diversity, equity and inclusion with a first-of-its kind federal contractor settlement, leading companies to grapple with practices that could strap them with subpoenas, court dates, or hefty payments to the government. (Bloomberg Law)
- FAR Council Moves to Prohibit ‘Racially Discriminatory DEI Practices’ Through Mandatory Contract Clauses The Federal Acquisition Regulatory Council (FAR Council) on April 20, 2026 released guidance and associated Federal Acquisition Regulation (FAR) model deviations to implement Executive Order 14398, which is aimed at combating discriminatory diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives by federal contractors. The guidance marks a significant escalation from aspirational policy statements to enforceable obligations by directing agencies to embed the order’s requirements into contracts and subcontracts through mandatory clauses. The inclusion of this mandatory language is also meant to further support the government’s enforcement efforts, substantiating its arguments that “illegal” DEI programs are material to its contracts—emboldening its current False Claims Act (FCA) enforcement directives. (Morgan Lewis)