The power shift in the US boardroom, a summary and reflection of Jeff Green’s reporting.

In an article published by Bloomberg’s Equality team, journalist Jeff Green draws attention to a quietly historic moment: for the first time in the US, white men no longer hold the majority of board seats in S&P 500 companies. The data, provided by ISS-Corporate at Green’s request, reveals that 50.2% of board seats are now held by women and non-white men, compared to just over 40% in 2019.

While the margin is narrow, the symbolism is significant.

Green’s reporting is grounded in years of covering diversity, equity, and inclusion in the workplace. In his article, he revisits a question he posed several years ago, what does boardroom intersectionality look like in practice? The latest numbers now provide a partial answer: a visible shift in representation, especially among white women and black board members, much of it driven by cultural movements like #MeToo and Black Lives Matter, as well as sustained pressure from large institutional investors and DEI advocates.

But this milestone comes at a paradoxical time. As Green notes, the anti-DEI backlash is intensifying. Federal diversity programs are under attack. DEI professionals are going underground. Some companies are laying low, afraid of drawing fire from political voices aiming to dismantle inclusive frameworks.

This contradiction raises a central question:

Is this power shift durable, or just a moment in time?

Green highlights another important statistic: not only are board seats more diverse, but the people now chairing the nominations and compensation committees, arguably the most powerful in the boardroom, are also majority women or men of color. This isn’t just symbolic. It affects who gets appointed next, and how corporate power continues to be distributed.

At the same time, new rhetoric is emerging. Some voices are calling for MEI, merit, excellence, and intelligence, to replace DEI. But, as Green wisely observes:

The most diverse boardrooms in U.S. history are now precisely the spaces

where merit can be most thoughtfully debated and applied. 

With a broader mix of lived experience, strategic insight, and values around the table, we may finally be in a position to redefine what excellence truly looks like.

As David Larcker of Stanford put it: “It will be an interesting experiment.”

At deb., we see this as a turning point, and hopefully last long enough for the results to become evident. It’s about who leads, who nominates, who sets direction, and how we define relevance in the modern boardroom.

While progress is evident in the US, and also is in Sweden, challenges remain. In Sweden the latest data from the Female Representation Index 2025 (published by AP2) shows that although the proportion of women on the boards of listed companies has reached a record-high 36.5%, disparities still exist beneath the surface. Among the 355 companies listed on Nasdaq Stockholm, 14 companies still have no women at all on their boards, highlighting that gender parity is far from universal across the market.

Even more striking is the pipeline issue: more than half of all nomination committees, the bodies responsible for identifying and proposing new board members, lack any female representation. This is critical because nomination committees act as gatekeepers to board appointments. If they themselves are not diverse, the ability to sustain or improve gender balance at board level is severely limited.

These figures underscore that while headline representation is improving, structural and cultural barriers remain, particularly in how new leadership is selected.