The numbers come first.
Women's share of executive positions in listed American companies fell for the first time in 2023 after nearly 20 years of uninterrupted growth, according to a study by S&P Global cited this month by The Economist. In the same period, women secured fewer new board seats at S&P 500 companies, and the share of female partners and managing directors at Goldman Sachs declined.
Those are the facts. They are inconvenient for everyone — including the institutions that spent a decade insisting that mandatory DEI programmes were the only mechanism capable of moving the needle.
What the data actually show
Katty Kay, BBC U.S. special correspondent and co-host of 'The Rest is Politics,' argues in a Fortune commentary that the reversal reflects two converging pressures: workplace disruptions caused by COVID and the dismantling of DEI policies. She cites more than a dozen global studies — from the IMF, the EU, Goldman Sachs and Pepperdine University — finding that companies with more women in leadership outperform competitors on bottom-line metrics.
That performance case is worth taking seriously on its own merits. Capital rewards talent wherever it sits, and any company that systematically sidelines capable people is leaving margin on the table. That is not a progressive talking point; it is arithmetic.
Kay also draws on Dr. Richard Petty, a professor of psychology at Ohio State University, who defines confidence as 'the quality that pushes us to confront our fears, take on new challenges and move from idea to execution.' Her argument is that confidence is a learnable, practicable skill — not a personality trait — and that workplaces err when they reward those who already appear confident rather than building it in others.
Peloton instructor Ally Love, interviewed for Kay's podcast, described her own method: she combats fear by 'going first,' ensuring doubt does not become a veto on action.
Where the frame matters
The steelman case Kay is making — that talented women are being held back not by merit gaps but by structural design and a confidence deficit that can be corrected — deserves engagement, not dismissal.
But the policy conclusion she implies is where free-enterprise readers should pump the brakes. The evidence that voluntary investment in talent development, mentorship and clear promotion criteria improves outcomes is solid. The evidence that mandatory, government-supervised DEI bureaucracies produce durable gains — rather than compliance theater followed by exactly the kind of backlash now producing the reversal she laments — is far thinner.
The editorial read
The market has already voted, in a sense. The moment DEI mandates became politically and legally contested, the metrics moved backward. That is not proof the goal was wrong; it is proof the mechanism was fragile. Companies that build genuine pipelines of skilled, confident talent — men and women — because it pays, will outperform those that do it to satisfy a regulator or a proxy advisory firm.
Free enterprise does not need a federal confidence curriculum. It needs clear rules, merit-based promotion and the freedom to compete for every capable person in the labor market. The S&P Global data are a cost-of-business problem. The solution is competence and culture, not compliance.
