Last week we looked at what companies are telling investors about board and workforce diversity. The conclusion was blunt: disclosure is disappearing. Quantitative board demographic disclosure has collapsed over the past two years, workforce disclosures are retreating, and metrics investors relied on for years are getting harder to find.
Disclosure is only half the story. What has happened to the people themselves?
Using PeopleReturn’s database of every current S&P 500 company, we analyzed the demographic composition of boards, CEOs, and CFOs over the past decade. The results are striking—not because progress has reversed, but because the mechanism that drove years of steady change has largely run its course.
For most of a decade, board diversity increased almost automatically. Every year, companies replaced departing directors with meaningfully more diverse new appointees, and the math only worked in one direction. As long as incoming directors looked different from outgoing ones, board demographics kept moving.
Between 2018 and 2024, new directors were, on average, 26.6 percentage points more diverse than the directors leaving S&P 500 boards. Across 2025 and 2026, that advantage has all but vanished, averaging roughly 1 percentage point. That single shift explains most of what is happening in corporate boardrooms today. The engine hasn’t gone into reverse. It has simply stopped accelerating.
The collapse is not gradual noise. From 2018 through 2024, the gap never fell below about 17 points; in 2025 it dropped to under 2, and in 2026 it sits near zero. That is a level break, not another wobble in a volatile series. It is the entire story of why boards are about to stop changing.
Not one story, but two
Underneath that headline number, women and people of color are on different paths.
For years, women were a much larger share of incoming directors than departing ones, which pulled female representation up year after year. That gap has now inverted. Through mid-2026, women account for 24.8% of directors joining boards but 28.3% of those leaving them, a negative gap of roughly three and a half points. For the first time in ten years, turnover is pulling female board representation down rather than up.
We are not the only ones seeing it. As far back as 2023, S&P Global Market Intelligence recorded the first decline in women’s share of C-suite roles across the S&P Total Market Index in the nearly two decades it had tracked the metric, a dip from 12.2% to 11.8% that, however small, broke an unbroken upward run. That was two years ago, in the executive suite; our board data now shows that reversal arriving at the director level. Two different datasets, two different layers of the org chart, pointing the same direction. That convergence is what separates a genuine turn from a one-year artifact.
People of color tell a different version of the same story. After the surge of 2020 and 2021, when the group briefly hit 45% of all new directors and the gap ballooned past 30 points—incoming and outgoing rates have converged. But the gap remains positive: in 2026, people of color are 21.5% of new directors and 18.9% of departing ones, a spread of about 2.6 points. Representation there is still inching up, just slowly.
The convenient shorthand: “board diversity has plateaued”, is true only in aggregate. Look one level down and it splits: the dynamic that added women to boards has begun subtracting them, while the machinery for people of color has slowed to a crawl but not stalled.
None of this means companies are removing diverse directors outright. Current S&P 500 boards look substantially different than they did ten yearsago. Women now hold 34.2% of board seats, up from 20.8% in 2016. Directors identifying as people of color have risen from 15.2% to 25.0%. Nearly half of all S&P 500 directors are now women or people of color, versus just under a third ten years ago.
The point isn’t that diversity has gone backward. It’s that the force pushing it forward has weakened to almost nothing; and in the case of women, has quietly reversed.
For investors, this is important because boards evolve through turnover, not wholesale replacement. A company adding one director a year can meaningfully reshape its board over time—but only if each appointment changes the composition. Once incoming and outgoing directors begin to look alike, that source of change disappears. Once departing directors are more diverse than their replacements, it runs backward.
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The executive suite, moving in slow motion
The same dynamic appears one floor up, though the numbers move far more slowly. There are only 500 CEO chairs in the S&P 500, and in a typical year only a few dozen change hands. Even a dramatic shift in succession planning takes years to become visible in the aggregate.
The long-term trend has clearly been positive. Women now lead 8.0% of S&P 500 companies, nearly double the 2016 level. Overall CEO diversity has climbed from 12.4% to 22.4%, with representation among people of color rising from 8.7% to 15.7%.
Momentum here has stalled too. The past few years have produced only incremental gains, and some categories have gone backward: women in the CEO seat slipped from 8.1% in 2024 to 8.0% now. Bloomberg recently reframed the problem well: the so-called ambition gap is really a support gap. The obstacle is no longer attracting diverse talent so much as sustaining the development and sponsorship that carry it upward. That support that, by many accounts, companies have begun to withdraw. That withdrawal won’t show up in CEO demographics right away. But there is already a measurable trace of it.
The same S&P Global analysis that flagged the C-suite decline also looked at what companies say, running natural-language processing across earnings calls, and found mentions of “diversity” and “inclusion” had fallen to their lowest level since 2012, down sharply from the 2020 peak. Attention is a leading indicator of investment, and investment is a leading indicator of who sits in the pipeline years out. When the talk goes quiet, the development programs, sponsorships, and deliberate succession planning that carry diverse candidates toward the corner office tend to go quiet with it. S&P’s own parity models absorbed the 2023 reversal and pushed their C-suite gender-parity estimate out by six to seven years.
Tomorrow’s CEOs, today
The CFO data offers a preview of that future. Because the finance chair remains one of the most common routes to the corner office, today’s CFO demographics are, in many respects, tomorrow’s CEO pipeline.
The long arc is still encouraging. Overall CFO diversity has risen from 18.6% to 30.0% over the decade. Women hold 16.8% of S&P 500 CFO seats, and representation among people of color has more than doubled.
Even here the curve is flattening. In one place it bends the wrong way. Women’s share of CFO roles has slipped from its 2024 peak of 18.3% to 16.8%, even as turnover stays high.
The most vivid illustration arrived from JPMorgan just last week. For years, the bank cultivated a bench of prominent women viewed as eventual successors to Jamie Dimon. On June 25, it named two men—Doug Petno and Troy Rohrbaugh—as co-presidents and, in the same breath, announced the retirement of Marianne Lake, the last leading woman in the race and one of Wall Street’s highest-ranking women executives. Jennifer Piepszak had already asked to be removed from the shortlist. Lake was no token contender—she ran consumer banking, one of the bank’s largest revenue businesses, exactly the kind of P&L seat that is supposed to lead to the top. The pipeline, in her case, had been filled for years and still didn’t deliver. In the span of a single announcement, the most-watched succession contest in American finance went from a field that prominently featured women to a two-man race. One bank doesn’t make a trend, yet it’s a clean demonstration of how quickly a pipeline that took years to build can empty.
Why plateaus deserve attention
Corporate leadership changes slowly by design. Directors often 8-10 years; CEOs frequently stay longer. That means the demographics investors see today largely reflect succession decisions made years ago, which is exactly why a plateau is worth watching. By the time headline representation starts to fall, the underlying bench has usually been thinning for some time.
This moment is no ordinary pause. Last week’s story was about transparency: companies are disclosing less. Our story here is about momentum: after a decade of steady demographic change, the force behind it has faded; and, for women on boards, has begun to work in reverse.
Whether this proves to be a durable plateau or the leading edge of a genuine decline, we don’t yet know. But one thing is already clear. If disclosure keeps declining while leadership demographics stall or slip, understanding who actually runs corporate America will depend less on proxy statements—and more on independent data.
What we’re reading:
- HR Monitor 2026: A turning point for the people function Economic pressures, AI disruptions, and shifting workforce expectations are redefining effective people management. While many HR functions have strengthened processes in recent years, our new HR Monitor report reveals a need for broader progress. Structural gaps persist between operational planning and strategic foresight, training and skills growth, employee expectations and organizational responses, and AI exA New Look at AI’s Impact on Jobsperimentation and scaled impact. (McKinsey & Company)
- What makes a job better? Survey evidence from job changers When workers change jobs, they may find themselves faced with numerous questions: How is the healthcare coverage? Will I be able to pick up my kids from school? How long before a promotion? We find strong evidence that workers value characteristics beyond pay and benefits in evaluating their new jobs, although pay and benefits remain important predictors of job quality. (US Bureau of Labor Statistics)
- Stop blaming Gen Z for resisting RTO: 71% say they want a hybrid balance—and now they’re quietly leading the office comeback Gen Z has been getting a lot of flak for their alleged workplace habits. Older generations assumed these newer entrants to the workforce don’t see the value of in-person exchanges—and that they’d be the loudest holdouts when return-to-office mandates landed. Years of data prove them wrong. (Fortune)
- The Effective Board: A Guide to Drive Board Performance our board agenda is packed, your board book is longer than ever, and the topics that matter most are moving faster than the scheduled meeting cycle. Coupled with stakeholders’ rising expectations of board members and activists on the hunt for targets, directors cannot afford missteps. The fundamentals of board effectiveness are urgently needed to navigate a world whose challenges are becoming daily more acute. (EY)
- A New Look at AI’s Impact on Jobs Companies that heavily invested in artificial intelligence hired more workers than those that invested little, new research suggests, challenging the narrative that large-scale adoption of the technology would lead to job losses. (USA Today)
- Nvidia’s culture of frugality extends all the way to the cafeteria Unlike many of its Big Tech peers, there’s no free lunch at Nvidia. Two former employees told Business Insider that cafeteria meals aren’t free but are subsidized, so some of the food’s cost is covered by Nvidia. Some beverages, such as coffee, are complimentary, but select bottled beverages and drinks purchased from on-site cafés were not. (Business Insider)
- Corporate Jobs Are Not Dying. They Are Changing. Corporate jobs aren’t dying. They’re changing the way they’ve changed before, in ways that are genuinely disorienting and require real adaptation. The people who navigate this era well won’t necessarily be the ones who abandoned the traditional path. They’ll be the ones who understood the new contract clearly enough to decide whether it worked for them. (The Muse)
- Want to WFH? Make Sure Your Boss Isn’t a Narcissist In the post-pandemic era, bosses have used all of corporate America’s favorite buzzwords — innovation, collaboration, culture, mentorship, productivity, performance — to rationalize calling workers back to the office five days a week. Cringy jargon aside, some of those justifications are reasonable and legitimate. But a newly released research paperfinds that a boss’s objection to working from home is more likely to be driven by ego and a thirst for control and status than it is anything else. (Bloomberg)
- The Case for Performance-First Management Performance-first management represents a gentle shift away from an approach where managers see their primary role as managing people and toward one where they empower their teams to deliver high-impact results within a complex and evolving reality. It keeps people at the center, but reorients the manager’s role around enabling performance, not just supporting satisfaction. Flexibility and care remain important—but they become tools in service of outcomes, not the outcomes themselves. (Harvard Business Review)