WASHINGTON — Companies are making good on promises to add racially and ethnically diverse candidates to their boards even as Congress and the Biden administration debate whether to require them to disclose the demographic makeup of directors, executives and workers.
For the first time, all companies listed on the S&P 500 stock index have at least one racially or ethnically diverse director, according to data from proxy advisory firm Institutional Shareholder Services Inc. The number of non-diverse S&P 500 boards was at 11 percent as recently as 2020, and at 5 percent last year before hitting zero this year.
Russell 3000 companies also made major strides in improving racial representation. Some 90 percent of companies on the index had at least one director who identified as a minority this year, up from 73 percent last year and 70 percent in 2020. The biggest gains came in the share of companies that had at least two minorities on their board. Some 55 percent of listed companies had two or more diverse directors in 2022, nearly doubling from 29 percent in 2020.
