Making the Case for LGBTQ Inclusion in the Board Room

Authenticity, Governance, and the Courage to Include: The Case for LGBTQ Representation in the Board Room. Keynote by Michael C. Camuñez, delivered on October 28, 2025 at the LGBTQ+ Corporate Directors Association Summit in New York City.

Inclusion as Governance, Not Ideology

Good morning. And thank you Fabrice, not just for that kind introduction, but also for your incredible leadership of this association and for all you do for our community. I’m privileged to know you and work with you.

It’s an honor to be here among colleagues, friends, and allies who believe that leadership is about purpose as much as power. We meet at a time when inclusion itself has become contested. Diversity, equity, and inclusion are too often dismissed as ideology rather than recognized as strategy. Some would have us believe that belonging is a political act, when in fact it is a performance imperative.

And let’s be candid about the moment we’re living in. In a shockingly short period of time, protections once considered settled have come under renewed threat. The rollback of DEI initiatives across government and business has emboldened a new wave of resistance to inclusion. American institutions across government and civil society are in full retreat, and the polarization and division we face has rarely been more intense.

At such a moment, the responsibility of business leadership—to model fairness, courage, and decency—has never been greater. This conversation is not about politics; it’s about performance—about the quality of our leadership and the breadth of our vision. Inclusion is not an abstraction. It is how institutions stay credible and competitive in a world defined by complexity. In short, inclusion isn’t just about good governance; it is now, I would argue, one of the last strongholds of American fairness.

A Personal Journey Toward Authenticity

I grew up in rural New Mexico in a devout Roman Catholic Hispanic household. My parents divorced when I was two, and I was raised by a single mom whose lifelong illness—and the faith that sustained our family—shaped me profoundly. I grew up believing God had a plan for me; I just couldn’t imagine that plan included being gay.

From childhood I knew who I was, and for years I tried to change it. From my upbringing in the seventies and early eighties, I had internalized a deep sense of homophobia. The playground and locker room slurs, the bullying and the antipathy toward gays and lesbians was everywhere. Becoming a man—a gay man—at the height of the AIDS epidemic felt like a death sentence in waiting. So through college, law school, and most of my twenties, I lived closeted and afraid—convinced that to be successful in business and in life, I had to be someone else.

After years of depression and struggle, I awoke on my thirtieth birthday completely exhausted. I remember that morning as if it were yesterday. Staring at the ceiling, tears streaming down my face, I made peace with God, gave up the internal fight, and accepted myself fully. Soon after, I met the man who would become my husband. Steven and I have now been together twenty-six years and have two wonderful children—living a life I once believed impossible.

But in 1999, coming out in corporate law was risky. Even in my firm—a top, white-shoe, national firm known for being more progressive and Democrat-leaning than most—there were no openly gay associates or partners outside of San Francisco. The movie Philadelphia streamed in my mind like a cautionary tale. As I tell many young people, this was pre–Will & Grace, and things were just different then. So, even having come out to myself and a few close friends, I decided I would keep my personal life private—until one phone call changed everything.

In 2000, the firm launched a “Values Award” to recognize the partner and associate who best embodied the firm’s values of excellence, integrity and citizenship. Without my knowledge, I had been nominated and selected to receive the inaugural award from a nationwide pool of associates. The chairman of the firm at the time—Ronald Reagan’s former White House Counsel, a conservative Republican—had his secretary call my assistant to ask, discreetly, if I had a wife who should be invited to the partner retreat where I would be presented with the award.

My assistant, Carol, was a piece of work, an outspoken New Yorker, who was offended by the question and responded firmly, “No—but he has a partner. His name is Steven.” A week later, I received a letter from the chairman inviting both Steven and me to attend the partners’ outing. It was for me, quite literally, a partner outing.

I panicked. I spent the next several weeks visiting partners’ offices one by one to come out before the retreat. It was terrifying and deeply emotional as many of you of my vintage may recall from your own experiences. But when the weekend came, the world didn’t end. It wasn’t exactly comfortable, but we made it through the awkwardness and, in the end, a few years later, I made partner early and became the first openly gay associate to do so in our firm. But I wasn’t the last. That experience taught me a truth that has guided me ever since: when one person chooses authenticity, it changes what’s possible for everyone around them.

Years later, after making partner and practicing law for a few years, I joined the Obama transition team and the White House staff in January of 2009 as Special Counsel to the President—one of the few openly gay commissioned officers in the White House at a time when even our own administration had not yet endorsed marriage equality. Steven and I had married in California in 2008, before Proposition 8 passed. I will never forget the mixed feelings I had on the morning of Election Day, trying to make sense of how my fellow citizens had, at once, elected the first African American as President while also voting to invalidate my marriage to Steven, sending a clear message I was not yet a fully equal American in the eyes of the law. Even so, when I was later confirmed as Assistant Secretary of Commerce, Steven stood by my side, holding the Bible as I took the oath of office in a full auditorium at the Hoover Building before hundreds of friends and colleagues. That moment affirmed for me that authenticity is the foundation of credibility.

The Power of Being Counted

Some years later, when I left the administration and returned home to California with Steven to start our family, I began my journey to become a corporate director. After years of counseling boards and companies as a lawyer, and advocating for them as a commercial diplomat, I felt I was ready to take my seat in the board room. I was aided greatly in this process by a friend and mentor, herself a veteran public company director who recognized my talent and was determined to help me. I am living proof of the impact of allyship—something I hope we will always value. My first corporate board opportunity was to serve the shareholders of Edison International, a Fortune 250 power company, one of the largest in the country. When I joined Edison’s board, I decided to show up fully—as a Latino and as an openly gay man. At my first Nominating and Governance Committee meeting, I reviewed the company’s draft proxy statement. It included a skills and diversity matrix listing gender, race, and ethnicity—but nothing about sexual orientation. So I asked, why not?

The management team said they’d never done it, weren’t sure it was appropriate, but would gladly include it if I wished. We added it, and Edison became one of the few U.S. companies to acknowledge LGBTQ representation in its proxy. I believed it mattered—for shareholders, certainly, but especially for our 15,000 employees. Later, USA Today profiled the story in an article titled Openly Gay in the Boardroom: Why Few Corporate Leaders Are Out About Their Sexuality. While the story was balanced, reading the online comments was both sobering and painful—readers questioned what my sexuality had to do with serving as a director. Others expressed outrage that this was even a concern. Those words still echo for me and remind me why visibility remains essential. It’s that issue to which I’d like to address my remarks today.

The Governance Imperative and the Perils of Groupthink

Corporate boards today govern amid extraordinary complexity—from cybersecurity, the rising challenges of artificial intelligence and climate change to geopolitical conflict and tariffs and the accompanying supply chain shocks they bring. In the face of these tectonic shifts, the greatest risk to a board is cognitive blindness, and the antidote, I believe, is difference. A board’s fiduciary duty is to ensure the company benefits from the best advice, people, and analysis. Expertise comes not only from credentials but from lived experience. Judgment is forged at the intersection of education, experience, and perspective—and diversity brings that synthesis to the table.

Diversity in the board room is thus a differentiator and an advantage. McKinsey & Company’s Diversity Matters Even More (2023) has found that companies in the top quartile for board-gender diversity are 27 percent more likely to outperform financially; those in the top quartile for ethnic diversity are 13 percent more likely. As David Rock and Heidi Grant wrote in the Harvard Business Review, diverse teams are simply smarter—they process information more carefully and avoid groupthink.

In the book, Wiser: Getting Beyond Groupthink to Make Groups Smarter (Harvard Business Review Press, 2015), my former Obama White House colleague and Harvard professor Cass Sunstein and his co-author Reid Hastie warned that like-minded groups tend to amplify errors instead of correcting them. Homogeneity breeds overconfidence; but dissent produces wisdom.

Governance researcher Antoine Canet, in his study Groupthink in the Boardroom: The Board’s Failure to Challenge Management (Université Paris-Dauphine, 2016), found that the most dangerous boards are not those full of conflict—they’re those full of silence. In short, across disciplines, the evidence converges: diverse boards aren’t ideological—they’re effective.

Real-world failures make the point even more starkly.

At Boeing, the 737 MAX crisis revealed how a celebrated board could become blind to risk. Engineers raised concerns about the plane’s flight-control system, but warnings were downplayed to protect deadlines and profits. The 2020 House Transportation Committee report described a culture of concealment and undue pressure to meet financial goals. The board—dominated by former CEOs and finance executives—lacked members with deep safety or engineering experience.

At Volkswagen, the emissions-cheating Dieselgate scandal was years in the making. Engineers knew the defeat software was illegal, but a culture of fear and conformity kept them silent. The supervisory board was large but not diverse in thought or independence. Analysts later concluded that VW’s board prized consensus among insiders over moral courage.

At Wells Fargo, millions of fake accounts were opened to meet impossible sales targets. The 2017 Independent Board Report found that directors failed to appreciate the magnitude of the problem and accepted superficial reassurances. A risk-averse, finance-heavy board deferred to management and missed a culture in distress.

Across these cases, three patterns emerge. First, the Echo Chamber Effect: technical warnings discounted because decision-makers shared the same worldview and incentives. Second, The Insiders’ Club: power concentrated among like-minded insiders leaving no room for independent judgment. And third, what we might call the Deference Trap: boards trusting management too much and employees too little.

Diversity is the guardrail against this kind of cognitive blindness. It changes the conversation, making silence harder and scrutiny easier—and that is what governance is for.

Why LGBTQ Leadership Strengthens Boards

So let’s ask the question directly: Why should sexual orientation or gender identity matter in the boardroom?

Because being openly LGBTQ in corporate life has never been a neutral act. It requires judgment, courage, diplomacy, and moral clarity—the same qualities every great director needs.

The traits forged through the LGBTQ experience—resilience, empathy, adaptability—are practical leadership skills shaped by life itself. Many of us have spent years navigating difference, reading rooms, calibrating risk, and building trust—all of which map directly onto the responsibilities of an independent corporate director. We know how to hear what isn’t being said, how to see around corners, and how to manage ambiguity. That perspective heightens awareness of culture, reputation, and social risk—the areas where today’s boards add the most value.

LGBTQ leaders bring distinctive capacities: judgment and risk calibration, moral courage, empathy, coalition-building, and adaptive intelligence. Living between worlds—professional and personal, cultural and social—creates a fluency in bridging perspectives. In a global marketplace, that capacity to translate across experiences is strategic gold.

Modern boards no longer govern only balance sheets; they govern trust sheets—brand reputation, workforce culture, and social license to operate. LGBTQ directors often detect early shifts in these intangible assets: the cultural inflection points that shape talent retention, customer loyalty, and public credibility. We bring a radar for reputation and empathy for the stakeholder voice—two of the most valuable sensors a board can have.

Authenticity, too, has governance value. When employees see directors who lead with integrity about who they are, they infer integrity about how the company leads. That is cultural governance—modeling the trust and transparency expected of management. In short, LGBTQ leaders make boards stronger not because of who we love, but because of what we’ve learned: how to listen, how to lead, and how to live authentically in a world that too often rewards conformity.

Inclusion in corporate leadership is not politics; it is performance and principle.

The Courage Recession and the Return of Silence

We are living through what I call a courage recession. The markets may be sky high, but profiles in courage are hard to find these days, at great risk to our country and the world in this unique historical moment. The Nasdaq board-diversity rule was struck down by the courts. Companies too numerous to name have withdrawn from the Human Rights Campaign’s Corporate Equality Index, citing “shareholder neutrality.” Even the National Association of Corporate Directors, where this year I was honored to have been named to the Directorship 100, has scaled back DEI programming with nary a public word. Just over a week ago in Washington I attended their annual conference, and while it was substantively engaging, it was shockingly silent on the value and importance of diversity in the board room—a sad sign of the times perhaps.

And now we can see the chilling effect in hard data. Professor Wouter Torsin, a governance scholar at the University of Liège in Belgium—home to one of Europe’s leading management schools—has analyzed corporate filings from 2018 to 2025. Examining more than 2,500 companies, including every S&P 500 firm, he searched for terms like LGBTQ, gender identity, sexual orientation, and employee resource group. Mentions of LGBTQ topics in S&P 500 filings have fallen from roughly 50 percent of companies in 2020 to barely 10 percent today.

Torsin notes that in five years, corporate America has erased nearly four-fifths of its public references to LGBTQ inclusion—bombarding us back to pre-2020 levels. The most dangerous form of regression isn’t open hostility; it’s quiet omission.

This retreat reminds us why visibility and advocacy remain indispensable. If the public language of inclusion is shrinking, our leadership must speak louder.

And we must also recognize the wider storm gathering around us.

The Gathering Headwinds

We are witnessing one of the most precarious moments for the LGBTQ community in a generation. The speed and scope of retrenchment are breathtaking. In just a few years, executive actions dismantling DEI policies have reshaped the legal and corporate landscape. Words like diversity and inclusion—once marks of enlightened leadership—have become litmus tests for ideological loyalty.

And beyond the workplace, the warning lights are flashing red. The Supreme Court has signaled that the principle of stare decisis—respect for precedent—no longer carries the weight it once did. If Roe v. Wade can be reversed after half a century, what about Obergefell? What about Lawrence v. Texas? Rights we thought settled are once again unsettled. Only days ago, during oral argument, the Court appeared willing to entertain the notion that so-called “reparative therapy”—a practice discredited by every major medical association—might be shielded under a tortured reading of the First Amendment. The implications are chilling: that pseudo-science and ideology might again be elevated over evidence and dignity.

We cannot pretend this is normal. The ground is shifting under our feet.

And at precisely this moment—when government is retreating from equality and some companies are abandoning public commitments to fairness—the moral responsibility of corporate leadership becomes even greater.

This is why representation matters. Because when politics falter, governance must lead. When the public square narrows, the boardroom must widen. When courage recedes in one arena, it must advance in another.

The stakes are not theoretical—they are personal. They are existential.

A Call to Leadership and Legacy

This is where the LGBTQ Corporate Directors Association comes in. Our mission is structural: to ensure that corporate leadership reflects the full range of talent on which it depends. We are building the pipeline for future directors, equipping them to serve with excellence, and shaping a culture of authenticity inside the world’s most powerful boardrooms.

Our responsibility now is threefold.

First, we must lead visibly—to be counted, to mentor, and to keep inclusion on the agenda even when it’s uncomfortable or unfashionable. Visibility is not about pride; it is about institutional courage. Every time we show up fully, we expand what leadership can look like. And as I’ve already suggested, our participation matters and can lead to better outcomes and better governance. We must make not just the moral case but the business case for our seat at the table.

Second, we must prepare the next generation. The path to the boardroom should not depend on luck or proximity. We must identify, sponsor, and prepare LGBTQ executives who will follow us—ensuring they are board-ready, confident, and equipped to lead. Our role is to hold the door open and keep it open.

Third, we must strengthen our network—our tent, our community. The LGBTQ community today is as diverse politically as it is demographically. We do not all think alike or vote alike. In a polarized time, that diversity can divide us—or strengthen us. The Association gives us a chance to choose strength: to bridge differences and find common cause around something larger than politics—the conviction that our community belongs in the boardroom and that our presence adds value.

We do not need unanimity to achieve unity. The table of leadership is big enough for all of us—for progressives and conservatives, for those long out of the closet and those just finding their voice. What unites us is not uniformity of thought but a shared belief that difference enriches leadership and strengthens governance. We lead not as symbols of diversity but as stewards of excellence. Authenticity builds trust, and trust is the currency of good governance. If we can model within our own community what genuine inclusion looks like—respectful, plural, principled—then we will have given corporate America the most powerful lesson of all.

Closing Reflection

I grew up believing that every person is made in the image of God. It took me decades to understand that meant me and my LGBTQ brothers and sisters, too. When I finally accepted that truth, everything changed—my confidence, my career, and my capacity to lead. When we bring our whole selves to leadership, we expand what leadership can be.

The world has outgrown the monochrome boardroom. Diversity is capacity. Inclusion is integrity. Difference is not a liability to be managed; it is an asset to be leveraged.

If we, as a community and as allies, pull together—mentoring, sponsoring, and advocating—then the next generation will not have to choose between authenticity and ambition. They will know the two are inseparable. Our goal is not simply to have seats at the table, but to make the table itself stronger. Because the essence of corporate excellence—the very soul of good governance—is the courage to include.