It's a brutal time for women executives and others who don't neatly fit the stereotypical ideal of a leader.

Why it matters: Not only has the zeal for diversity that has defined the last decade faded, but backlash from the White House has made firms even less willing to take risks on "nontraditional" candidates, including women, people of color and LGBTQ+ people.

The big picture: For years, executive recruiters were asked to find diverse slates to fill the top spots inside U.S. companies, moving up the numbers, if only slightly, inside these firms.

• That's not happening anymore, says Lindsay Trout, a talent consultant at executive search firm Egon Zehnder who finds candidates at the C-suite and board level for large companies.

How it works: A board running a search for a CEO will draw up a list of specifications for candidates.

• They might say, "We're looking for public company CEOs who are in the tech industry at companies that are at X scale," Trout explains.
• Go with those specs and "you end up with a list that inevitably excludes females from consideration." It would be like looking for someone to head an NGO and only considering those with experience as a U.S. president or secretary of state.

Zoom out: For a few years, firms would also say they would like to consider a "diverse slate" so you could bring in other qualified candidates with potential who did not exactly meet the criteria.

• "Now that is not part of the conversation or expectation," Trout says.
• "People are generally satisfied with the progress that they have made."

Context: After a surge of appointments in 2020 and 2021, companies now name fewer women and people of color to their boards, Axios reported last year.

• Some firms have started going backward. At Meta, women make up 23% of board directors. A few years ago in 2022, that figure was 44%.
• Over the past year, no women CEOs were recruited into Fortune 500 firms. The ones who nabbed that top spot were internal hires.

Between the lines: The process of looking for diverse slates did drive some resentment and likely hurt some men.

• "It probably is true that equally as compelling white male talent didn't get the nod" for board roles, Trout says.

Reality check: Many large companies have continued to defend DEI, at least from shareholder attacks.

• Not all firms have walked away from this work, says Jennifer McCollum, CEO of Catalyst, a nonprofit that advocates for women in the workplace.
• Scaling back entirely from DEI can lead to increased risks on the legal side, as well as talent loss and reputational damage, she says.

The bottom line: Companies are "adjusting, thoughtfully," McCollum says.

The jobless rate for Black women has been creeping higher all year.

Why it matters: This could be a sign of weakness in the overall job market, economists say, though others point to the Trump administration's purge of the federal workforce and its push to eliminate DEI efforts.

By the numbers: The demographic-level data on unemployment from the Labor Department can be volatile month-to-month, so Axios looked at the three-month trailing average, based on the jobs numbers released Friday.

• By this measure, Black women's unemployment rose to 5.8% in May, up from 5.3% a year ago, surpassing the jobless rate for Black men, which declined to 5.6%.
• For white women, the jobless rate has stayed relatively flat. While it rose for white men, their unemployment rate is still below the overall number.

Between the lines: Women in general make up a slight minority of the federal workforce, but they represent the majority of employees among the agencies targeted by the White House, including the Department of Education, where Black women comprise 28% of workers.

• Black women are overrepresented in the federal employment compared with the private sector, accounting for nearly 12% of the federal workforce in 2020, compared with about 7% in the civilian labor force, according to a federal report.
• "The layoffs at the federal level where Black people are more represented, the impacts of the tariffs, particularly on small businesses that hire Black women, and just the overall use of DEI as a slur, which may be contributing to a lack of hiring of Black women, all of these factors are probably at play," Andre Perry, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution told Bloomberg.

Reality check: The federal job loss doesn't fully explain the decline in overall employment for Black women.

• Federal employment has fallen by 69,000 this year, per the Bureau of Labor Statistics, though the number is expected to move higher because those on paid leave or receiving ongoing severance are still counted as employed.
• From January to March, Black women's employment fell by a whopping 306,000. It has recovered a bit since then and now is down by 233,000 for the year to date.
• "It's a really large drop and it can't just be the federal layoffs," says Jessica Fulton, senior fellow at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies.

What to watch: Black unemployment in the U.S. always trends higher than the overall number. Historically it has been double the rate of white workers, though that gap narrowed a bit in the post-pandemic job market.

• A higher Black unemployment rate can be an early recession warning sign, Fulton says. "Black unemployment rates rise more sharply and sometimes more quickly than for other workers" heading into downturns, she notes.

The bottom line: Uh oh.

Investing in firms that invest in women has paid off this year.

By the numbers: The SPDR MSCI USA Gender Diversity ETF was built to track companies with high gender diversity scores, which indicates they're successfully promoting female leadership throughout the ranks.

• Year to date, that ETF is up 5.4%, beating the 2.2% gain in the S&P 500.
• Another fund in a similar vein, the BNY Mellon Women's Opportunities ETF, is also beating the broader market with its 3.3% gain this year.

The intrigue: ETFs that track companies promoting gender diversity broadly, like those above, are doing much better this year than ETFs that specifically focus on companies with female CEOs.

The bottom line: It pays to invest in women.