Corporate America is no meritocracy

Back in 2008, there were 12 women running Fortune 500 companies. Even though that equaled a measly 2.4%, it was still progress. A decade earlier, that number was 0.4%, or just two women (Jill Barad at Mattel Inc. and Marion Sandler at Golden West Financial Corp.). I remember these stats well because at the time I had just started at Fortune Magazine, where one of my first assignments was working on its Most Powerful Women in Business list that tracked the comings and goings of the handful of women who had managed to claw their way into the C-suite. Since then, I’ve used the count of female CEOs as a telling — albeit imperfect — measure of the advancement of women in corporate America.

This year’s number has just been published and it’s alarming. Women run 55 Fortune 500 companies, or 11%. Objectively, this is an improvement. But if the growth continues at the same pace, it would take about 100 years for women to reach parity with men. What concerns me even more is that the number, while tied with last year’s record, didn’t even move an inch. If corporate America were the meritocracy that everybody claims to want, women — who make up about half the labor force and earn most college degrees — would not remain so dramatically and stubbornly underrepresented in its most important role.

Taken alone, you could argue the stagnation is just a blip and not a broader sign that the hard-fought gains for women in business are stalling. That doesn’t appear to be what’s happening. When you look at other gauges of progress, it becomes clear that in many cases we’re seeing not just a flatlining but a full-on backslide: For the second year in a row, the gender pay gap has widened — the first consecutive increase in the gap since the 1960s. In the boardroom last year, white men made up the majority of new directors at S&P 500 companies for the first time since 2017; women took on about a third of new seats, down from a high of 44% in 2022. The decline in non-white directors was even steeper, dropping 24 percentage points in four years to 20%. The employment rate for Black women is experiencing one of its steepest declines in the last 25 years. For at least a decade now, women have been underrepresented at every level of the corporate ladder, especially the most senior roles where they made up just 29% of C-suite jobs. The ambition gap between men and women is the largest in the 11-year history of consultancy McKinsey & Co’s and women’s advocacy nonprofit LeanIn.org’s annual survey on the state of female white-collar workers. Researchers found a six-percentage point spread between female and male workers who say they want to be promoted.

I’m not going to sugarcoat it. These stats paint a grim picture. And there’s no single factor that’s led to the declines that can magically be reversed and make everything better. Rather, they are the consequences of a web of cultural, political and policy shifts. It’s the rollback of diversity, equity and inclusion programs that was propelled and inspired by the Trump administration and anti-woke activists. It’s the curtailing of flexible work arrangements — the kinds that research has shown in some cases did more to diversify corporate America than many formal DEI programs. It’s demanding workers return to the office five days a week and give more hours. It’s scaling back or cutting paid leave. It’s calling for more “masculine energy” in the workplace.

It’s not as though 2008 was a real moment of advancement for women in business either. But back then, CEOs would at least say out loud that the dearth of women in leadership was a problem — even if they didn’t plan to do anything about it. Now, the message coming from the top is that these declines in progress don’t really matter all that much.

The big bosses are saying it explicitly when one out of five companies admits they place little or no priority on women’s career advancement — a figure that jumps to about 30% when it comes to women of color. And they’re saying it implicitly in the kind of statistics they track: the share of S&P 500 companies disclosing data on women in management dropped last year by 16%, while those reporting the overall share of women in their workforces fell 14%.