What you probably already know: Racial and gender diversity in both the C-suite and corporate boardrooms is more complex than it may appear. Women have made notable strides in recent years, but statistics still paint a troubling and stark reality: Women accounted for just 29% of C-suite-roles in 2025, the same percentage as the year before, according to the Women in the Workplace report from McKinsey & Co. and LeanIn.Org. As recently as 2024, there were only six Asian women and no Black or Hispanic women in the S&P 500. Yet one academic study came to an interesting conclusion: C-suite demographics are less racially biased than they seem.
Why it matters: That analysis, by the University of Chicago Booth School of Business and published in the Chicago Booth Review, says claims of widespread racial bias in corporate America are misleading because the wrong comparison is used. The report argues that It’s more accurate to compare executives to people with the same college degrees rather than the entire U.S. population. “In popular thinking, the racial/ethnic benchmark that is most commonly assumed to be the right one to assess executive representation is the U.S. population,” says John Hand, a visiting professor of accounting from UNC Kenan-Flagler. “But from an economic labor supply point of view, the U.S. population is unlikely to be an informative benchmark.”
What it means: The report says the benchmark “makes all the difference for the question of misrepresentation,” noting that only about one-third of the population holds a bachelor’s degree, while almost all top-level executives do. The median age of executives at large companies is 55, “meaning that the executives have been climbing the promotion ladder for 30-plus years,” while three decades ago higher-education institutions contained far fewer racial minorities. In 2021, students of color earned 47.1% of associate degrees, according to the American Council on Education, and 37% of bachelor’s degrees.
What happens next: Hand argues that the future racial, gender and ethnic makeup of U.S. executives will look less like the U.S. population and more like that of the world in the next 20 to 40 years, particularly if students from foreign countries continue attending college here and remain. U.S. companies also increasingly recruit top executives from foreign countries, even given the country’s recent political stance on immigration. The American Immigration Council notes that nearly half of Fortune 500 companies in 2025 were founded by immigrants or their children.
