Nearly 7 out of 10 Top 100 firms have no Black execs in the C-suite

Six years into tracking diversity in the C-suite of Top 100 companies, one thing is clear:

Progress has stalled for women and reversed for Black executives.

We first analyzed the racial and gender makeup of the executives leading the Top 100 in 2020, when we found Black executives accounted for 5.6% of the 680 roles we identified. Today, the percentage stands at 4.3% of 1,093 positions.

Women held executive positions at 22.6% in 2020, but since then the percentage has been 29% and never cracked 30%. That plateau has held steady for three years.

The picture is not uniformly bleak. The number of female CEOs among the Top 100 rose from 16 last year to 20 this year. The number of Black female executives also ticked up from 19 to 24.

But those gains are outweighed by what is moving in the opposite direction. The number of companies with no women in their C-suite increased from seven last year to nine this year.

The overall minority representation (people identified as Black or non-white) slipped from 13.1% last year to 11.8% this year.

The number of companies with no Black executives rose to 68 this year compared to 59 in 2025, another sign of the challenges Black executives have in rising up the ranks of their companies. In other words, nearly seven in 10 companies in the Top 100 have no Black executives visible among their senior leaders.

None of this happens in a vacuum. The past year has seen a significant rollback of federal diversity, equity and inclusion programs as multiple executive orders have targeted DEI initiatives across the government.

That pressure has rippled through the contractor community as well. Several large companies have stepped back from public diversity commitments they made just a few years ago.

The longer-term concern is the pipeline. The DEI programs among the Top 100 companies weren’t about optics but were meant to build a bench of future leaders from underrepresented groups.

As those programs are scaled back or eliminated, the damage will eventually show up in an even whiter C-suite.

We cannot draw a straight line from policy to personnel data — leadership rosters change slowly and for many reasons. But this is the first year that the effects of the DEI rollback could plausibly show up in the numbers.

The next few years will tell us whether this is a temporary dip or the beginning of even more declines. Based on what we have seen so far, there is little reason for optimism.