Last week, Priscilla Almodovar exited as CEO of Fannie Mae. The mortgage giant had been through months of uncertainty; Trump is considering an IPO, and the Federal Housing Finance Agency had already removed eight members of Fannie Mae’s board and installed its own director Bill Pulte as chair. Diana Reid was dismissed as CEO of Freddie Mac months earlier.
The next day, another leadership change shook the Fortune 500. It was announced that Toni Townes-Whitley was out as CEO of Science Applications International Corp, or SAIC. Although not owned by the federal government, SAIC is also closely tied to the executive branch. It’s a $7.5 billion-in-revenue contractor to the Department of Defense and other branches providing complex IT and engineering services across the military, NASA, and more.
Besides close ties to Washington, the CEOs of these two companies had something else in common too: both were among very few women of color to serve as Fortune 500 CEOs. Townes-Whitley had, for most of her two-year tenure, been one of two Black female CEOs in the Fortune 500 alongside TIAA’s Thasunda Brown Duckett. The beginning of Joi Harris’s leadership at energy company DTE in September brought that number up to a record three for not quite two months; now, it’s back down to two.
Almodovar was the only Latina to lead a Fortune 500 company.
Both women were on the 2025 Most Powerful Women list, with Almodovar at No. 74 and Townes-Whitley at No. 95. Townes-Whitley joined us at the Fortune Most Powerful Women Summit talking about the state of the defense sector and her path to leadership just a week before her exit.
Now, the Fortune 500 is left with 52 female chief executives, down from 55 at the Fortune 500’s time of publication in June. That’s a drop from 11% to 10.4% of companies on the list. (Other exits since June include Michele Buck at Hershey and Safra Catz at Oracle.) Women of color remain scarce as Fortune 500 leaders. Besides Duckett and Harris, there’s AMD’s Lisa Su, Vertex Pharmaceutical’s Reshma Kewalramani, S&P Global’s Martina Cheung, and U.S. Bancorp’s Gunjan Kedia.
At Fannie Mae, the board named Peter Akwaboah interim CEO and is looking for a permanent successor. At SAIC, Jim Reagan is serving in that role while the board does the same.
Already, we’ve seen the impact of a lessened focus on gender and racial equity in leadership during Trump 2.0. In late September, Bloomberg reported that white men made up a majority of new directors at S&P 500 companies for the first time since 2017. Every company’s leadership situation is different, and the question is whether these CEO exits stand alone—or are the harbinger of a broader trend.
Emma Hinchliffe
emma.hinchliffe@fortune.com
The Most Powerful Women Daily newsletter is Fortune’s daily briefing for and about the women leading the business world. Subscribe here.
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ON MY RADAR
How corporate feminism went from 'love me' to 'buy me' The New Yorker
Mikie Sherrill and Abigail Spanberger were runaway favorites. They haven’t sealed the deal Wall Street Journal
Allison Williams knows she's not the underdog New York Times
PARTING WORDS
"There’s something about him that makes people want to help him."
— Sally Susman on NYC mayoral frontrunner Zohran Mamdani. The Pfizer exec played a critical role in helping Mamdani connect with New York's skeptical business community.
