What percent of US CEOs are white?

This article appears in the May 2018 issue. Click here for a free subscription.

5.3 percent.

Harvard Business Review says this proportion of large U.S. companies has CEOs named John compared with 4.1 percent that have CEOs who are women.

Firms with CEOs named David, at 4.5 percent, also outnumber women-led businesses.

New numbers published in late April by The New York Times showed many of the different leadership roles in the U.S., including politics, law, business, tech, academia, film and media, in which ther are more men of a certain name represented than there are women, total.

For example, there are fewer women among Republican Senators or Democratic governors than there are men named John in those respective roles.

Additionally, the Harvard Business View says 95 percent of CEOs are white men and 85 percent of board members and executives are white men.

This story accompanies the multi-part May issue cover story, “Women at Work.” Click here for a free subscription.

The disproportionate toll the COVID-19 pandemic has taken on women and people of color is undeniable. In one year, women across major economies were 24% more likely to lose their jobs than men. In one month (December 2020), women accounted for every net reported job loss in the United States—with Black and Latina women bearing the overwhelming brunt of these losses. Global GDP could suffer $1 trillion in losses by 2030 if nothing is done to address the pandemic’s regressive effects on women’s employment alone. In addition, the past year has opened more eyes to the climate crisis, heightened inequality, and failures of governance in emergency response—all of which hit society’s most marginalized the hardest while elevating risk for business and governments alike.

CEOs must recognize that these are not sector-specific risks. Every business will be affected. Every business must be ready to respond. Leadership teams that reflect the diversity of our communities and our world are the ones best fit for the future—and best equipped to respond in ways that safeguard their business interests.

But a crisis of conformity still plagues C-suites and boardrooms around the world. Nearly 90% of Fortune 500 CEOs are white men, a staggering figure. Only one is a Black woman (though there will be a second when Thasunda Brown Duckett becomes CEO of TIAA on May 1). Globally, women occupy a mere one in five seats in the boardroom.

In my own experiences as candidate for President of Iceland, as cofounder and executive chairman of an investment firm, and as a mentor to female entrepreneurs, I regularly encounter the same problem: a lack of recognition that changing who is in charge is the best way to change how we tackle our biggest, collective challenges while simultaneously improving corporate performance.

Everyone stands to benefit from a more diverse and equitable world—especially business. And don’t just take my word for it. A growing body of research affirms the direct link between diversity in leadership and improved business performance. Benefits also extend to talent recruitment and retention, customer service, and social responsibility initiatives. What is more, new research recently featured in Harvard Business Review shines a light on the role of women leaders in accelerating innovation and “embrac[ing] transformation while seeking to reduce the risks associated with it.” This powerful business case should inspire the corporate class to see gender-balanced leadership as the transformative lever that it is.

In 2021, no CEO or corporate director should need to be convinced of the business case for gender-balanced and racially diverse leadership teams. In fact, the majority of business leaders get it. Many are speaking out. Why, then, are we moving from talk to action at such a glacial pace?

CEOs must meet this moment by closing gender and race gaps in leadership. At the B Team, a collective of global business and civil society leaders working toward sustainability, accountability, and equality goals, we are calling on business leaders to establish voluntary and time-bound commitments to ensure gender-balanced and racially diverse C-suites and boardrooms by 2025—and to deliver on these commitments.

Forward-thinking leaders are already showing the way. Norway’s sovereign wealth fund, the world’s largest, called on its portfolio companies to set targets for gender diversity on boards. Nasdaq filed a proposed rule late last year that would require listed companies to publicly disclose diversity-related statistics and meet—or explain why they are not meeting—minimum boardroom diversity targets. In the European Union, companies that don’t report their gender pay gaps could soon face fines.

In my role as CEO of the B Team, I am proud to partner with companies that acknowledge their 21st-century responsibilities as corporate citizens—and act accordingly. Natura, the Brazilian-headquartered cosmetics company and world’s largest B Corp, is committed to achieving gender balance on its senior team and board by 2025, as well as equitable representation across management of other underrepresented groups. PensionDanmark, a major European labor market pension fund, is committed to gender balance across its entire staff by 2025 while advocating for responsible corporate tax practice and a transition to a net-zero economy. Ikea, which has already achieved gender balance across global management, is inspired to take further action, committing to close gender pay gaps and ensure racial and ethnic equality across the business.

This is what 21st-century CEO leadership looks like. The new leadership playbook recognizes the need for holistic action—and the degree to which diverse, gender-balanced leadership teams can be a catalyst for these efforts.

This year, CEOs have a key opportunity to take bold action in line with this new playbook: the Generation Equality Forum. Just as countries, businesses, cities, universities, and others have rallied behind the Paris climate agreement, this moment marks their opportunity to do the same for gender. The forum officially kicked off in March in Mexico City, sounding a clarion call for “concrete, ambitious, and transformative actions to achieve immediate and irreversible progress toward gender equality.” We are calling on businesses to showcase their commitment by signing up to become a Generation Equality Commitment Maker.

We must disrupt the crisis of conformity—with diversity from top to bottom—if we hope to ensure a better way of doing business that values people and planet alongside profit.

The Inclusion Revolution is here, and we all stand to benefit.

Halla Tomasdottir is CEO of the B Team. 

More opinion from Fortune:

A collection of stories, insights and resources on 21st-century business leadership—visit The New Leadership Playbook, today.

That’s an awful lot of workers. If that group were one giant U.S. company, it’d be second only to Walmart in terms of size.

And it would take at least 26 skyscrapers to give each of those 5,089 executives and senior officials a corner office.

(The average skyscraper has about 50 floors; the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission fully explains which job titles get the “executive/senior officials and managers” designation in a footnote here.)

Of those high ranking officials, 80% are men and 72% of those men are white.

Using those 16 companies as a representative sample for the entire Fortune 500 cohort would result in a pretty wide margin of error: 24.3%. So, it’s important to point out that the workforce at 16 companies that share data isn’t a perfect predictor of the other 484. However, it seems likely that women at Fortune 500 companies see better representation in senior official roles than they do among CEOs.

The Most Powerful Women team reported on Wednesday that 32 of the CEOs on this year’s list are women. It’s an historic high-water mark that pushes their representation to 6.4%.

Seventy-three percent of the senior executives, men and women, are white. The rest are 21% Asian, 3% Latino/a, 2% black, 0.6% two or more races, 0.2% Native American and 0.1% Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander.

Compared to the demographics of the overall employed workforce, Asian and white workers at these 16 companies are overrepresented in senior leadership by 15 and 10 percentage points, respectively. Latino/a and black executives are underrepresented by 9 and 13 percentage points.

People who represent two or more races are three times as common in the overall workforce as they are in senior executive roles. Meanwhile, Native Americans and Hawaiians or Pacific Islanders are underrepresented by 0.3 and 0.4 percentage points.

There’s lots of evidence, statistical and otherwise, that corporations struggle most with increasing diversity among their top leadership.

In fact, a former senior executive at American Express – which is ranked at #85 on this year’s list – talked to the Wharton School about in 2006.

He’s quoted in the Wharton article saying that just the mere presence of blacks in the CEO or chairman positions have an impact.

“It promotes change among the employees who are able to look at their peers in an entirely different light than [they did] in the late 1970s when I was in government,” said Weldon J. Rougeau, who was director of federal contractor compliance at the Department of Labor during the Carter administration.

“That’s all very good,” he continued. “Does it mean that there are not any problems in the workplace? No, of course not.”

At the time the article was published, American Express’s first black CEO, Kenneth Chenault, was 5 years into his now 16-year tenure. When he was named as the head of the company in 2001, he became the third black CEO of a Fortune 500 company.

TIAA’s (then TIAA-CREF) Dr. Clifton R. Wharton, Jr. was the first in 1987. In 1999 he was followed by Fannie Mae’s Franklin Raines, who was eventually ousted after the 2008 mortgage crisis. As of the release of the 2017 list, there are currently four black CEOs among the cohort: Roger W. Ferguson, Jr., another TIAA CEO; Kenneth C. Frazier of Merck; Chenault at American Express; and J.C. Penney’s CEO Marvin R. Ellison.

In January Xerox’s Ursula Burns, who became the first black woman CEO on the list in 2009, stepped down from her post. That meant there were no more black women among the Fortune 500 CEOs and that was still true when the new list was released yesterday.

There are just two women of color on the list: Geisha Williams, the Latina who runs PG&E and Indra Nooyi, the Indian American (she would be counted in the Asian category on an EEO-1 Report) CEO at PepsiCo.

One of those problems Rougeau may have been referring to when he talked about corporate diversity in 2006 is the way tokenism manifests for high-ranking people from marginalized communities. They wind up bearing the implicit responsibility to make sure other employees who look like them achieve a similar level of success.

That, said Dr. Kira Banks, leaves too many people on the bench when it’s time to increase corporate diversity and retention.

She’s an associate professor at St. Louis University and co-founder of The Mouse & The Elephant, a consulting firm that helps corporations execute on diversity initiatives. (They tell the story behind their name, based on a 2010 book by Laura Liswood, here.)

When Banks looked at the above diversity data for senior executives at 16 Fortune 500 companies, she was careful to point out that it need not be a depressing reminder that women and people of color – and other marginalized groups that aren’t counted on the EEO-1 Report – struggle to make it to the upper echelons of corporate America.

Rather, she said, we should delight in the number of potential allies who work for these titans of industry.

“I think the burden is on the predominantly white men in these positions to be intentional in speaking out about the pipeline and mentoring issues. It shouldn’t be our goal to say, ‘Hey, look, there’s another Asian woman who’s in this leadership position and that means I can make it too,’” she said.“That perpetuates tokenization.”

It’s often the case that the demographics of leadership are treated as a death sentence for the upward mobility of minority employees.

It wasn’t until last August that Business Roundtable, an association of CEOs whose companies represent 15 million workers, specifically cited diversity at the top of its list of characteristics to consider for board composition in its Principles of Corporate Governance guide.

“Diverse backgrounds and experiences on corporate boards, including those tho represent a broad range of society, strengthen board performance and promote the creation of long-term shareholder value,” the report said.

This was such a significant departure from previous editions of the report that it got a call out in The New York Times’ DealBook.

And on that point, it would seem the CEO group and Banks agree.

“You don’t have to be a person of color or a woman or a person from another marginalized identity to be a champion for diversity,” she said.