Historically, corporate board rooms . Yet the trend began shifting in the 1970s, partly due to advances from the civil rights era and pro-diversity initiatives by activists and business groups.
I the and political spheres for decades. One useful diversity measure is the share of board members who are not white men.
And for the third straight year, white men did not hold a majority of seats on the boards of America’s 50 largest corporations, according to my analysis of the most recent 500 list. However, the proportion of white men still rose slightly after a two-year decrease.
But the white man/nonwhite man board split alone is a blunt measure. It doesn’t reveal the nature of current diversity, how it links to the broader political landscape, or what can be learned about diversity by examining who the 2025 corporate directors were.
Patterns in the data
While about a decade ago white men held two-thirds of seats on the top 50 boards, in 2023, for the first time, 50%. In 2024, that number fell to 48.4%, but this year it climbed back to 49.7%.
Since white men make up roughly 31% of the U.S. population, they remained heavily overrepresented across all three years.
As the percentage of seats held by white men increased from 2024 to 2025, though, the share held by white women dropped from 25% to 24.5%. Other for the entire 500.
The share of seats held by Black people also declined, from 15% to 14.2%, as did 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 vast majority of Asian American men and women who held 33 seats on the top 50 boards in 2025 were born outside the U.S., completed undergraduate studies in their home countries, and then came to the U.S. for graduate school.
Most Hispanic directors were similarly born abroad, and many did undergraduate or graduate work – or both – in the U.S.
Education is relevant for future diversity monitoring partly because of the Trump administration’s efforts for for higher education.
In fact, denying entry to Asian and Hispanic individuals who want to study in the U.S. could, over time, shrink the pipeline to corporate leadership and reduce the number of Asian and Hispanic corporate directors as well.
The politics beyond some notable board changes
Looking at some of the people who left boards and the new appointments – changes that led to this year’s diversity drop – is informative.
For example, to : four white men and an Egyptian American woman. One of the white men was Dana White, CEO of the Ultimate Fighting Championship and a longstanding, active Trump supporter.
The woman Meta added to its board is Dina Powell . She was and is married to Dave McCormick, a Republican financier who currently serves as 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 ties to the president. In late December 2025, Powell McCormick resigned from her position .
Some other notable diversity changes from 2024 to 2025 occurred on the boards of and .
Because the Federal Housing Finance Agency regulates these two companies, the Trump administration’s hostility to diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) impacted diversity levels on their boards in 2025. In January 2025, Trump nominated William Pulte, a Trump donor, to be FHFA director.
Pulte quickly removed some women directors, Black directors and an Asian director. As a result, the percentage of white male directors on those two boards rose from 40% in 2024 to 65% in 2025. Notably, though, the new appointees included a Black man, another man with an Iranian mother and Pakistani father, and a man of Spanish descent whose parents were Turkish immigrants.
Trump’s second-term cabinet – which includes five white women, a Black man and a Hispanic woman – had far less diversity than the cabinets of Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden but twice as much as his first cabinet. Trump has shown he is open to some diversity as long as – in line with his general recruitment policy – are sufficiently supportive of him. Similarly, Pulte’s changes reduced diversity while including some individuals from diverse backgrounds who were loyal to Trump.
The ironies of elite diversity
All of this ties into a topic I’ve explored in three editions of a book I co-authored with Bill Domhoff, “.” In it, we examine what we call “the ironies of diversity.”
A key irony of diversity is that as a small number of people from previously excluded groups gain entry to the power elite, the selection processes and their very presence justify continuing the status quo in terms of power and wealth distribution.
The ongoing selection of some directors who add diversity to the top 50 panies’ boards is part of this process, as is Trump’s surprisingly diverse cabinet.
Those pushing for more diversity in corporate leadership fear the 2025 data could be the start of a longer decline.
, Emeritus Professor of Psychology,
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