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Despite the Supreme Court's , and mounting pressure on corporations to eliminate their diversity, equity and inclusion programs, the top 50 Fortune 500 companies continued to diversify their boards in 2024.

As , I've been for decades. And as I reported in The Conversation last year, 2023 marked the first time that fewer than half of the directors of the top 50 Fortune 500 companies were white men. At the same time, increasing numbers of white women and Black, Asian and Hispanic people of all genders held board seats.

Looking at data from mid-December 2024, I found that the top 50 companies' boards continued to become more diverse. However, as political and legal challenges to DEI intensify, future trends remain unclear.

Back and forth on DEI

After the 2020 murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, many Fortune 1000 companies pledged to and implemented DEI programs to track and improve diversity. But in 2023—presumably encouraged by the Supreme Court's affirmative action decision—anti-DEI activists on corporations to roll back these initiatives. In response, many big companies .

But the DEI backlash didn't show up in the 2024 data on corporate board membership.

Diversity on boards increased dramatically from 2011 to 2023, and the trend generally continued into 2024, with the number of seats held by Hispanic and Black people and white women all rising despite a slight dip in the number of seats held by Asian people. As a result, the share of seats held by white men fell from 49.7% to 48.4%, while the share held by everyone else rose from 50.3% to 51.6%.

Examining the data on Black, Hispanic and Asian board members by gender reveals some intriguing differences, though some variations may be due to small sample sizes. For the top 50 companies, the number of seats held by Black women rose by five, while the number of seats held by Black men fell by two. In contrast, two more seats were held by Asian men in 2024 than in 2023, but the number of seats held by Asian women dropped by three. The number of seats held by Latinos and Latinas also increased, by four and two, respectively.

So why did board-level diversity increase despite the DEI backlash? It could be because boards of directors change slowly. Most of the top 50 boards on the Fortune 500 list make no changes in a given year, and those that do typically replace only one or two people. In some cases, boards expand by adding new members without removing old ones, which can be a quick and easy way to increase diversity. As a result, the number of seats on the top 50 boards increased from 574 in 2023 to 593 as of mid-December 2024.

There are other indications that these boards are becoming more diverse than they were in the not-so-distant past. In 2023, four companies either had an equal number of men and women on their boards or more women than men. By 2024, that number had increased to seven.

Increasingly diverse chief executives

The number of CEOs of the top 50 companies who weren't white men also rose, from 14 to 15. For most of 2024, the number was 16, but in October the board at CVS asked Karen Lynch, a white woman, , and replaced her with a white man. At the end of 2024, the top 50 Fortune companies included seven white women, three Asian men, three Latinos, one Black male, and one Latina as CEOs.

Moreover, 12 of the top 50 CEOs, or 24%, were born outside the U.S., an indication that the country's corporate elite is becoming more globally diverse than in the past.

Just as many of the CEOs of the top Fortune 500 companies were born and raised in other countries, so, too, were many of the Black, Hispanic, Asian and white female directors. In fact, almost all of the Asian chief executives were born outside the U.S., as well as most of the Hispanic CEOS. If corporate boards continue to grow in diversity—or even stay at the same level—they'll probably draw heavily on men and women born and educated outside the country's borders.

The data shows a slight uptick in diversity for the boards of the top 50 companies on the Fortune 500 list from 2023 to 2024. But after his inauguration, Donald Trump immediately took on diversity efforts both in the federal government and the corporate world. As a print headline in The New York Times noted, "."

The future of board diversity under Trump

In the weeks before Trump's second inauguration, McDonald's announced that it was , and Mark Zuckerberg announced that Meta was terminating its DEI programs. On his first day in office, Trump issued an executive order and requiring the government to look at private sector DEI initiatives. Not long afterward, Google announced that it, too, was , making it clear that it was doing so because of Trump's executive orders.

But a few of the top 50 companies, including Costco, Apple, Microsoft and JP Morgan, took public stands claiming that they were planning to continue their DEI policies. Costco's stance drew special attention because, as The New York Times put it, the board's views were "." Within a week or so, 19 Republican state attorneys general .

There is concern that the attacks on DEI will decrease diversity in the pipeline that leads to the executive suites of American corporations, and that this in turn will lead to less diversity in boardrooms. As Fortune's Lily Mae Lazarus , "The precedent set by the Trump administration could undo decades of progress that have allowed women and people of color to rise to the C-suite and boardroom."

Whether the many attacks on DEI—first from right-wing bloggers, then from the Supreme Court, and then from the president—will affect the makeup of Fortune-level boards in 2025 and beyond remains to be seen.