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The UK’s biggest listed companies have achieved gender-balanced boardrooms, but a lack of women in top jobs has seen the number of female FTSE 100 chief executives fall below 10, according to a Government-backed report.
Progress comes despite more firms looking to “weed out” costly or ineffective diversity goals amid a string of companies scaling back initiatives in the US, the boss of the FTSE Women Leaders Review said.
New data from the report shows that women now occupy 43.4% of boardroom positions across FTSE 350 companies.
This is up from 42.1% last year, and marks a steep increase from the 24.5% representation recorded in 2017 when the report was launched.
It also means listed companies continue to exceed the 40% voluntary target set by the review.
Vivienne Artz, chief executive of the FTSE Women Leaders Review, said a lack of resistance to diversity initiatives among the biggest UK corporates had propelled change in recent years.
She told the PA news agency: “You can’t ignore the fact that there’s a lot of questioning going on, particularly from across the ocean, in relation to DEI (diversity, equality and inclusion).”
But she said the organisation was “really pleased and impressed” with the willingness of companies to share their data, “so we haven’t encountered any resistance in the UK”.
The latest report comes as a number of large businesses in the US, including Google, Meta, Amazon and McDonald’s, have scaled back diversity programmes amid political pressure after Donald Trump’s presidential election victory.
Ms Artz said companies that were setting diversity targets “to look good” were “probably having an existential crisis” over DEI programmes.
But she said it could be “healthy” for firms to review their initiatives and “focus on what is actually working to help the business versus fluffy stuff, extra stuff, things that actually might be more irritating than effective”.
“I think it’s helpful to weed out those practices that are not working,” Ms Artz added.
Meanwhile, the analysis also found that the proportion of women in leadership positions increased to 35.3% across FTSE 350 firms, from 34.5% the previous year, as of the end of October 2024.
This spans executive positions including chief executive and chief finance officer, as well as those directly reporting to the leaders.
But on the FTSE 100, the number of female chief executives decreased from 10 to nine, remaining “few and far between, with little progress in a decade”, according to the review.