Today we released our new board of directors diversity dashboard, featuring race, gender, ethnicity, and LGBTQ data and insights for the boards of every S&P 500 company. The sortable dashboard, which will continue to be updated by our analysts in real-time, details several metrics of interest to institutional investors and DEI stakeholders, including the type of disclosures made by each company, the overall diversity of each company’s board, and a wide range of granular company and industry sector data.
Looking at the current makeup of the S&P 500 over time, our analysts uncovered a number of insights about board diversity, including:
- Full disclosure is increasing, but still rare. In their latest disclosure, 115 S&P 500 companies (23.0%) disclosed what is required by NASDAQ’s Board Diversity Rule, up from just 14 companies the prior year (2.8%).
- Overall board of directors diversity: The overall diversity of S&P 500 boards, as measured by the number of women and underrepresented groups in director positions, stands at 46.0%, a 37.3% increase since 2017.
- Women: 31.6% of S&P 500 board members are women, up from 22.3% in 2017. Organon, Omnicom Group, Paramount, Citigroup and American Water Works lead the S&P 500 with the highest percentage of women directors.
- Five companies have more than half of their board comprised of directors from underrepresented groups. These outlier companies – Monolithic Power Systems, Accenture, Mastercard, Fortinet and ADM — lead the S&P 500 with the highest percentage of board members who identify as Black, African American, Hispanic, Latino, Asian, Pacific Islander, Native American, Native Hawaiian, Alaska Native, or LGBT. In total, 23.3% of S&P 500 board members come from these underrepresented groups, a 44.7% increase since 2017.
- LGBTQ board disclosures are on the rise, but representation remains elusive. 25.6% of companies disclosed the aggregate number of LGBTQ directors on their boards, up from 6% in the prior year. However, only 57 seats, or 1% of the total number of existing board seats in the S&P 500, are held by LGBTQ+ directors, and only 52 companies (10.4%) have at least 1 LGBTQ director on their board.