If you visit any of the websites of the UK's biggest businesses and check out the photos of their CEO, your odds of seeing a face that isn’t male and white are almost as long as they were a decade ago. Despite efforts to diversify the boardrooms of the country's largest companies through investigations such as the Davies review in 2011 and the Hampton-Alexander report in 2016, the number of women in the CEO role at the UK’s top firms has barely grown.
This was highlighted in a report this month by Cranfield School of Management, whose headline finding was that only eight women occupy the role of CEO in FTSE 100 companies. Although the number of women on their boards is rising – now at 38%, exceeding the 33% target set by Hampton-Alexander – the percentage of executive directorships occupied by women was flat for a second year at 13.7%.
One of the report’s co-authors is Sue Vinnicombe, professor of women and leadership strategy at Cranfield. She says: “The good news is the percentage of women on the board has gone up. But the thing that isn't changing is the pathetic number of women in the executive director jobs of CEO and finance director.”