Board composition remains in sharp focus as boards continue efforts to increase their diversity amid ongoing calls for boardrooms to better reflect the diversity of the customers they serve, their employees, and the communities in which they operate. Unfortunately, studies of the racial and ethnic backgrounds of directors and executives have historically been limited by a lack of data.
However, the growing list of global regulations related to board diversity disclosures, including Nasdaq’s Board Diversity Rule, as well as institutional investors’ and proxy advisory firms’ expectations for transparency reflected in their updated proxy voting policies have begun to have an impact. Despite this progress, thorough studies of the racial and ethnic background of corporate directors require laborious research and are rarely conducted. To fill this gap in the study of diversity of corporate leadership and American boardrooms, the KPMG Board Leadership Center (BLC) partnered with the African American Directors Forum (AADF) to publish our inaugural study examining African American representation on public Fortune 1000 boards in 2020.
The increased attention to systemic racism following the murder of George Floyd in May 2020 and subsequent widespread protests helped to bring attention to the underrepresentation of African Americans in U.S. boardrooms. Numerous stakeholders acknowledged the need to increase the representation of African Americans in the boardroom and many companies added African American directors to their board after June 2020.
Our follow-up study in 2022 finds that although there is still work to be done, significant progress has been made, particularly since the social justice movement in the spring of 2020.
Among the findings:
- Just over three-quarters (76 percent) of public Fortune 1000 companies had at least one African American director on their board as of September 2022, compared with 61 percent at the end of 2020.
- Only 22 percent of those companies had more than one African American director on their board.
- Forty percent of the African American directors in this study joined their boards after June 1, 2020, showing that much progress has been made following the murder of George Floyd in Mary 2020.
- African American directors served as board chair at 13 public Fortune 1000 companies; one also held the CEO role and 18 served as lead independent director.
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