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Big US companies already appear less likely to appoint women to corporate boardrooms since President Donald Trump returned to office, representing a reversal from his first term (2017-2021) when senior businesswomen’s prospects relative to men’s continued to improve.
The share of new female board appointments at S&P 500 companies fell from 41 per cent in 2024 to 37 per cent in the first five months of this year, the lowest level in six years, according to the Conference Board, a think-tank. The ratio was 34 per cent for companies in the broader Russell 3000 index, also a six-year low.
The drop in female appointments at board level serves to highlight a broader pullback in corporate America’s gender diversity efforts as the Trump administration cracks down on progressive causes.
“It is a notable decrease given the kind of environment we are in,” says Andrew Jones, a researcher at the Conference Board’s Governance and Sustainability Center. “You can interpret it obviously as to some extent the influence of a more challenging political and legal environment for corporate diversity.”
Female professionals in the US have made strides over the past decade and the gender pay gap has narrowed.
Consultancy McKinsey’s latest report on women in the workplace shows 29 per cent of respondents had female senior executives in 2024, a jump from 17 per cent in 2015, but the steepest gains were achieved after 2020, the last full year of Trump’s previous term, when women had a 21 per cent share.
Meanwhile, US female professionals were paid $0.83 for every dollar earned by their male counterparts in 2025, according to data provider PayScale. That compared with $0.73 a decade earlier, but little changed from 2020 at $0.81.
Career progress for women remained strong throughout Trump’s first term as many key indicators continued to improve despite political pushbacks. Public records show women accounted for 41 per cent of newly appointed board directors at S&P 500 companies in 2020, up from 37 per cent in 2017.
One New York-based woman, who declined to be identified, says she faced “no specific pushback” against gender diversity when launching a financial start-up in the late 2010s. “The first Trump administration was more about political chaos and rhetoric,” she says. “You can tune that out when managing the business on a day-to-day basis.”
The environment, however, had begun to shift even before Trump returned to power this year. The McKinsey survey found just 16 per cent of respondents offered women-focused sponsorship programmes in 2024 — where senior leaders help junior staff to develop their careers — compared with 24 per cent in 2022, and 31 per cent in 2017.
Corporate executives say a wave of lawsuits from conservative groups in 2023 has fuelled a backlash against workplace diversity, equity and inclusion efforts, making women-centred career initiatives increasingly risky to introduce.
“We feel the tide shifting,” says one executive at a Fortune 500 company. “We no longer feel the pressure to respond and so we are not going to make [gender diversity] a top priority.”
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The pushback on gender diversity efforts intensified as Trump regained power. Shortly after his election win in November, the Nasdaq stock exchange lost a legal battle over its rule requiring listed companies to have at least one female director or explain why they do not.
“There have been some tangible changes in the regulatory landscape that have affected board diversity,” says Jones. “I don’t think we’re suddenly going to see a huge collapse in the appointment of women directors, but we may see this slowdown continue as diversity is just not on the agenda in the way that it was a few years ago.”
The entrepreneur from New York says she recently opened some women-only education and networking programmes to men to avoid regulatory scrutiny. “We used to have this programme because it is the right thing to do,” she says. “Right now we are just more careful in terms of how we market that.”
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The shifting policy environment is starting to unsettle some female professionals. In a March survey of 864 managers across the US by Resume Builder, a CV app, 24 per cent of respondents said women had received less respect in the workplace since Trump took office in January.
“We have spent many years trying to mitigate bias against women through policy,” says Stacie Haller, chief career adviser at Resume Builder. “Now we have given those people permission to be bigoted again.”
Yet it is open to question whether the Trump administration alone is to blame for the backlash. The New York entrepreneur says discrimination against women has long been a systemic issue in the US and Trump has “received too much credit for being able to change things overnight”.
“It is always there,” she says. “What happened with the current administration is that the president just normalises it and makes it acceptable for people to vocalise that.”
