Former CEO and now corporate board member Debra Lee recalled a conversation she had years ago, when she was asked to join the board of a popular beauty brand. The chief executive of the brand at the time saw her at an event, called her attractive, and said he wanted her on the board. She took him up on it. There were only two other women on the board of directors at the time and Lee quipped that it was older white men passing around lipsticks, trying to decipher the shade.
Lee, formerly chief executive at Black Entertainment Television, now serves on the boards of Marriott, Procter & Gamble, and Warner Bros. Discovery and founded Leading Women Defined and cofounded the Monarchs Collective. She shared this memory and others about joining her first board and sometimes being the only woman or Black woman in the room at Fortune’s Most Powerful Women summit in Laguna Niguel, Calif. on Monday. She was joined by two other board members and a board search consultant who discussed the ways boards have evolved, and how they’re continuing to transform to oversee companies and hire and fire CEOs the current era.
On that point, boards are spending more time and focusing on succession planning. It’s “more so than they ever had been before,” said Sachi Vora, partner and co-head of global financial officers practice and a member of the CEO and board practice at executive search firm Heidrick & Struggles.
Meanwhile, the traditional definitions of diversity are evolving. It isn’t simply gender and ethnicity anymore, it’s skill set, age, location, among other things. In the years following George Floyd’s murder in 2020, companies recognized that diversity at the highest levels of their companies was lacking. Appointments of ethnically diverse board members surged in 2020, 2021, and 2022, as companies focused their recruitment efforts on finding directors who had the skills and experiences their boards needed, while also prioritizing racial and ethnic diversity. Heidrick’s 2024 board monitor data shows a steep incline in the number of diverse directors elected after 2019 that has since leveled off. Although, there was a slight uptick in the number of Asian and Asian American directors appointed last year, the analysis found. According to Vora, the data suggests that last year represented pre-pandemic diversity levels.
The Supreme Court ruling on affirmative action during the summer of 2023 has also hit some boardrooms. A few businesses have attempted to apply the ruling to diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts within companies, which could lead to stalled progress. In her experience, Lee said, the general counsel at three of the companies where she serves as a board member came back with tweaks to their programs and the language used therein. “No one came back and said, we can’t help Black women, we can’t help people of color,” Lee explained.
Courtney della Cava, senior managing director at global investment firm Blackstone, said the company has always believed “it’s good for business to have a broad perspective, diverse backgrounds.” Nothing has changed for Blackstone, della Cava said.
And given that it is an election year, some consumers expect businesses— and their senior leaders—to take a stance, one way or another. While a board of directors probably won’t delve into politics publically, it can be representative of the company’s employees and its customers. “Over the last few years, we’ve added some prominent Democrats, added some prominent Republicans, to help us serve our customers and colleagues,” said Anna Marrs, group president of global commercial services and credit and fraud risk at American Express.
Either way, progress has been made in the boardroom, along with some steps backward, which can only mean more needs to be done.
