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Let's not toss the diverse baby out with the bath water....

Recent anecdotes from two women inspired me to write this note - and I write it from the perspective of someone working to accelerate innovation and growth.


The anecdotes? One is from a Gen Z rising star in policy, shaping briefs that move real-world outcomes. The other is a Gen X corporate leader, with a track record any board would want on their team. Both are diverse women. Both are being slowly undercut—not by an old‑guard insider, but by a minority man who seems convinced there’s only room for one of them.

I'm thankful to be in an organization that has been consistent about the benefits of an inclusive culture. In other cases, we may be seeing some backsliding. It is the 1990s zero‑sum game all over again: talented people from under‑represented groups turning on each other because they don’t trust the system to have more than a token seat at the top.

What the 1990s taught us

In the mid‑1990s, the Federal Glass Ceiling Commission found that only about 3–5% of senior management roles in large companies were held by women, and almost all of those women were white. In 1994, just two women were CEOs of Fortune 1000 companies, and representation of women and minorities on big‑company boards was “limited” to the point of invisibility. Women made up nearly half of employees, but only about a third of officials and managers, with women of color almost entirely shut out.

The research was blunt: there was a glass ceiling, and it rested on three layers of barriers—societal bias, weak government enforcement, and internal corporate practices like closed networks, biased evaluations, and informal “old boys” sponsorship. In that world, it was rational for minority professionals to believe there was only one “diversity seat” on the executive floor, and to fight each other for it.

How far we’ve actually come

Fast forward to today and the landscape is not perfect—but it is fundamentally different. Women now hold roughly 29–34% of board seats in major US indices like the Russell 3000 and S&P 500, the highest levels in history. Women are about 10% of Fortune 500 CEOs—still far too few, but a world away from “two CEOs” in the mid‑1990s. And women of color, while still severely underrepresented, have doubled their share of management roles since 2000 and grown their presence in executive ranks.

These shifts did not happen by accident. They came from decades of legal pressure, investor expectations, and internal work on bias, sponsorship, and accountability. In other words, intentional rules, norms, and metrics expanded the size of the opportunity set for diverse talent; they did not magically make things fair, but they made it harder to waste capability.

Why rolling back our learnings and wins with the new rules is dangerous.

Now, as some companies and regulators roll back or water down DEI commitments, old behaviors are resurfacing. The scarcity mindset returns: “If protections go, my only safety is to undermine the other woman, the other person of color, the other outsider.” That is exactly what 1990s research warned against—because when organizations ration opportunity at the top, the competition inside under‑represented groups gets brutal, and the system gets to pretend the problem is “infighting,” not structure.

Here is the reality leaders know from both data and lived experience:

Rolling back guardrails does not erase the business case or the moral case. It just removes some of the protections that prevented bad habits from flourishing.

A call to leaders and colleagues

The worst mistake now would be to internalize the rollback and start playing 1990s games with 2020s stakes. Gen Z policy leaders and Gen X corporate leaders—especially women and people of color—should not be re‑running a script written when there were two women CEOs in the Fortune 1000 and virtually no women of color in the C‑suite.

Leaders still have choices:

  • Refuse to treat top roles as a single “diversity slot” and broaden the aperture of who gets stretch work, P&L responsibility, and sponsorship.
  • Call out quiet sabotage and scarcity‑driven behavior, especially when it comes from within under‑represented groups, and re‑anchor on standards of performance, integrity, and mutual elevation.

The last 30 years proved that when organizations invest in diverse talent, everybody wins—employees, shareholders, and communities. That progress is too hard‑won, and too valuable, to abandon because some rules are being rolled back or because fear is tempting talented people to turn on each other instead of building the next tier of leadership together.


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