Women in leadership have a documented boardroom winning streak, and a court record cutting against it. Women held 20 percent of Russell 3000 board seats by 2019, double the 2008 share, per Institutional Shareholder Services. Yet the mandates that accelerated those gains fell in 2024 and 2025. Both halves are true at once, and neither cancels the other.
The pushback is not a mood. It is a list of rulings with dates, courts, and named parties. So is the progress. Reading both in one place takes minutes, and most coverage hands over only one side. The pattern repeats across the record: numbers improve, rules tighten, courts answer, and the market keeps voting.
How much progress is documented?
Index data gives the cleanest picture. In data from 2019, Institutional Shareholder Services counted women in 20 percent of Russell 3000 director seats, double the 10 percent recorded in 2008, per the compiled boardroom record. The same index put Black directors at just 4.1 percent, up half a point since 2008. Gains came, and they came unevenly.
The executive floor lags the boardroom. At the start of 2021, women held 7.8 percent of Fortune 500 chief executive positions, up from 5 percent in 2019. Board seats moved faster than the corner office did. Readers following this should also see Employers dropped the degree requirement — hiring barely moved.
What the boardroom rules required
Two mandates shaped the decade. California's SB 826, passed in October 2018, set deadlines for women directors on public companies headquartered in the state: two women on five-person boards by 2019, three on seven-person boards by 2021. Nasdaq took the disclosure route. The SEC approved its listing rules in August 2021, requiring board diversity statistics plus at least one director who identifies as female and one from an underrepresented group, or a written explanation. We covered a connected angle in The federal noncompete ban is dead. State law never was..
Where the pushback landed
The courts answered. A separate lawsuit found SB 826 unconstitutional on May 13, 2022. In December 2024, the US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit held in Alliance for Fair Board Recruitment v. SEC that the SEC lacked authority to approve the Nasdaq rules. On January 21, 2025, Nasdaq filed to repeal its board diversity listing requirement, citing the federal court's vacatur of the SEC's August 6, 2021 order, per the Federal Register notice.
The repeal took effect on February 4, 2025, the date the court decision became effective. No company was ordered to unwind its board. The rules fell, and the seats did not.
Who gained while the rules stood
The scoreboard shows partial progress on both fronts. Women reached 20 percent of Russell 3000 director seats while Black directors held 4.1 percent. Pay tells a parallel story. Women working full time in wage and salary jobs had median weekly earnings of $1,005 in 2023, which was 83.6 percent of the $1,202 median for men, per the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Titles moved faster than paychecks did. Occupation moves the number too: the BLS puts the highest median weekly earnings for women in architecture and engineering, at $1,635, and in computer and mathematical occupations, at $1,628, in 2023. The pipeline into leadership runs through exactly these rooms, which is why the gap matters beyond any single paycheck. Court rulings set the rules of the race; the numbers show where the finish line still sits.
Conclusion: the trend line and the court line diverge
Strip the noise and two lines remain. The boardroom trend line runs up, from 10 percent of Russell 3000 seats in 2008 to 20 percent in 2019, on index data. The legal line ran the other way: SB 826 struck down in 2022, the Nasdaq rule vacated in 2024 and repealed in 2025. Progress now rests on conduct rather than compliance. The next scoreboard reading will show which force is stronger.
