When Jim Fitterling of Dow and Tim Cook of Apple step down as CEOs in July and September respectively, the Fortune 500 will lose two widely respected leaders who led their companies through transformational eras.
The exits of the two men, who both identify as gay, will also mark a dispiriting step backward for LGBTQ+ representation in the C‑suite. After September, there will be only one out LGBTQ+ chief executive left in the Fortune 500: Land O’ Lakes’ Beth Ford. It’s a reminder of how the highest echelons of corporate America remain largely straight, white, and male—and how difficult it is to maintain gains in representation.
Only three years ago, there were four LGBTQ+ CEOs when Macy’s was still led by Jeff Gennette, who stepped down in 2024. Outside of the Fortune 500, there have also been recent exits: Coty, the beauty products maker giant, saw its CEO Sue Nabi, a rare transgender executive, leave her job late last year.
Other historically underrepresented groups in the C-suite have also seen only modest gains in representation. There are 11 Black CEOs and 22 women CEOs among the 500—historically high percentages but far below each group’s share of the U.S. population. (Fitterling is being replaced by Karen Carter, a Black woman.)
To be sure, there will almost certainly be at least one more gay CEO in the Fortune 500 soon. OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, is widely expected to list shares on the stock market later this year, and its CEO, Sam Altman, is gay. (Companies can only be included on the Fortune 500 if they file financial information with U.S. regulators.) Still, two CEOs out of 500 for a group that makes anywhere from 3% to 10% of the U.S. population (and more among younger Americans) will hardly be a paragon of representation.
So what gives? For one thing, the number of LGBTQ+ chief executives is almost certainly an undercount, given that people sometimes stay in the closet—mum about their sexual or gender orientation. (Cook only came out in 2014, three years after taking the reins.)
“If you look at the average age of CEOs, they’re not Gen Y and Gen Z, and very few are Gen X—mostly they’re older Gen X or early Boomers,” says Todd Spears, a former banker and the founder of Out Leadership, a group that works to increase gay representation in the corporate world. “The lived experience that leaders in that generation [have] is to divide work and personal, and not be out in their work life.”
Pointing to tech executives, who tend to skew young (Altman is 41, making him a millennial), Sears says the number of openly LGBTQ+ executives is bound to increase.
But he and other LGBTQ+ advocates also say that the current political climate, with its backlash to gay rights progress, is playing a role. It’s not surprising if current or aspiring LGBTQ+ executives decide to downplay that aspect of their lives to avoid getting pulled into the culture wars or into fights over diversity and inclusion efforts, he says. Indeed, in the last three years, countless companies have backed off of DEI initiatives, to avoid punishment from the Trump administration or under pressure from conservative activists.
Earlier this year, the Human Rights Campaign said 65% fewer Fortune 500 companies participated in its latest Corporate Equity Index than the previous year. That doesn’t mean that all those companies have halted their DEI efforts; it could be that they just don’t want to report on them. More broadly, support for marriage equality in the U.S. fell by six percentage points from its peak, to 65% last year, according to a recent Gallup poll.
Spears says there’s some evidence that LGBTQ+ employees are feeling less safe being open about their identities at work.”We are seeing that some young employees are going back in the closet, employee resource groups are being dismantled, and the progress from inclusion is at risk of disappearing,” he says.
Still, there have been some signals that large corporations are feeling more comfortable again showing support for the LBGTQ+ community. Bloomberg last week reported an increase in corporate sponsorships for Pride Month Events this year.
