More women on boards – but call for further action
THE number of women in City boardrooms has nearly doubled in four years, with almost a quarter of FTSE 100 board positions filled by females – but campaigners are calling for more to be done.
Nearly a quarter – 23.5pc – of FTSE 100 boards are now female at an executive or nonexecutive level – edging closer to the 25pc target set by Lord Davies of Abersoch in 2011. When Lord Davies published his original report, commissioned by Business Secretary Vince Cable and compiled by Cranfield Business School, there were 21 FTSE 100 boards that had no women on them. Now every Footsie board has at least one female member.
However there are calls for more to be done. Forty one companies in the FTSE 100 have reached the 25pc target but there are still only five female chief executives and of the 35 executive director appointments made across bluechip boards in the past 12 months, women took only five, which equates to just 14.3pc.
Terry Scuoler, chief executive of manufacturers’ organisation EEF, said: ‘Gains in female board representation are being made in non- executive roles, but there continues to be a low number of women executive directors. This is something the FTSE 100 as a whole must start to address if it is to be certain of attracting the best talent from the widest possible pool.’
Only 17 female appointments on FTSE 100 boards are needed to reach the target.
Cable said: ‘The evidence is irrefutable: boards with a healthy female representation outperform their male-dominated rivals.’
But changes in the FTSE 250 have been slower. There are still 23 all-male boards in the mid-tier index and the percentage of women holding executive directorships has fallen to 4.6pc. Sharron Gunn, commercial executive director of the Institute of Chartered Accountants, said: ‘FTSE companies have come a long way since 2011, but you can’t just evaluate success or failure on how many women are recruited into board positions. We still have a gender pay gap.’
Allyson Zimmermann, executive director at consultancy Catalyst, said: ‘This issue is about talent not gender. Diverse teams think differently and are more innovative and more creative in solving problems. To accelerate change, we need to stop treating gender as if it were a woman’s burden and think of it as a talent issue.’