August 21, 2025 – Josie Cox, Forbes
The proportion of women on boards and leadership teams across America’s largest companies has fallen slightly during the first half of 2025, as the Trump administration’s executive orders on diversity, equity and inclusion have started to shape the C-Suite.
According to a new report published by data firm Altrata, women accounted for 33.7% of board positions across the S&P 500 during the first quarter of 2025, and 33.6% during the second quarter. That’s an approximate one percentage point drop from the 34.7% of board positions they held during the first quarter of 2024.
Across broader leadership teams—which Altrata defines as the top layer of management of a given company—the percentage of women also edged lower from 28.5% in the first quarter of 2024, to 27.9% in the first quarter of this year, and 27.7% in the second quarter.
The downward trajectory follows several years of increased representation of women at the highest echelons of business. During the first quarter of 2022, for example, women made up just 31.1% of all S&P 500 board positions and 25.7% of all leadership teams.
“The change in government directives on diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives amid a general shift in the socio-political climate in the US may have played a role in the recent decline, along with economic uncertainty holding back diversity programs,” said Maya Imberg, Altrata’s head of thought leadership and analytics.
Almost immediately after taking office for the second time, President Donald Trump issued a slew of executive orders targeting DEI programs across both the public and private sectors. In reaction, many companies across the U.S. and beyond, announced that they were rolling back such initiatives or pausing programs. References to diversity, equity and inclusion in Fortune 100 company reports also dropped 72% between 2024 and 2025, according to an analysis by Gravity Research.
Despite this however, Imberg said that there were signs that employee diversity “remains a business imperative for many organizations.” “Diversity is seen as one component of a wider recruitment strategy designed to ensure a company’s senior executives, and other staff, have highly diverse skill sets and a broad array of experience deemed essential for creating commercial value and future-proofing the business,” she added.
The latest Altrata report also notes that among S&P 500 firms, those led by female CEOs tend to have a higher proportion of women both on their boards and in their top leadership teams. It also shows that women continue to have an outsized representation in so-called “oversight-centered” non-executive director roles. They are, for example, still especially underrepresented across the CEO, CFO and COO functions.
According to the Women Business Collaborative, an alliance of organizations that monitors, tracks and advocates for women in leadership positions, there were just 41 women CEOs across the whole of the the S&P 500 in 2023—and just 39 in 2024.
Read the original published article here.