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Companies that quote on the largest stock market will be lost a goal to have women in 40 percent of the high executive roles by 2025, according to a campaign backed by the Government to boost female representation.
The FTSE Women Leaders review found that women constituted 35.3 percent of the senior leadership roles, defined as those of the Executive Committee and the superior managers immediately below that level, throughout the FTSE 350 in 2024, which puts To companies on the way to lose a 40 percent target this year.
While the biggest United Kingdom Companies They are “within a surprising distance” of fulfilling the objective, having increased female representation in executive ranks of 24.5 percent in 2017, the rhythm of change had “decelerated,” said the annual review report on Tuesday.
The objective “cannot be achieved beyond 2025, since some companies still have less than a third of their leadership roles held by women,” according to the report. The end of this year marks the deadline for the five -year review.
Companies have done Better progress By increasing the number of women in the meetings. The campaign said that 43.4 percent of the Board roles in FTSE 350 companies were in the hands of women last year, above 25 percent in 2015 and only 9.5 percent in 2011.
The FTSE Women Leaders review was launched in 2021 as the successor of the Hampton-Alexander and Davies reviews. Together with the increase in the objectives for the joints, it was given an expanded mandate to analyze the senior executive roles.
Women constitute 32.7 percent of the roles of the FTSE 100 Executive Committee, compared to 30.4 percent in 2023. But almost a third of companies have not yet crossed the threshold of 33 percent.
Brands and Spencer It was the FTSE 100 company with the greatest number of women in its leadership team, followed by the Pearson educational company and the Next retailer.
Meanwhile, the Fresnillo Mining Group and the Game Workshop group, which makes the Warhammer fantasy game classified as groups with the lowest proportion of women in leadership roles.
“There was an impulse, through many initiatives, to reach this brand, and although the optics looks good, there are still some real challenges,” said Pavita Cooper, president of 30% Club UK, a campaign led by chairs and main Executives to increase gender diversity at Board levels and senior management. “Women are not in the right roles to get the best jobs.”
Cooper added that women in the roles of the Executive Committee often executed “support” functions, such as compliance and human resources, instead of having ownership over finance and complete business divisions, which led to a “gap of” gap of can”.
The report occurs when the Russell Reynolds Associates cazatalantos published the investigation separately on Tuesday that shows the female leaders who face “Double At” When they take the first job, be criticized for being too ambitious or not ambitious enough.
“It really is an obvious double standard,” said Laura Sanderson, co-capital of Europe, the Middle East and India in Russell Reynolds.
The report, which analyzed more than 20,000 news articles that cover almost 750 executive directors in FTSE 100, S&P 500 and Euronext 100 companies and include comments from analysts, shareholders and policy formulators, argues that women are perceived more negatively in The public eye.
“Society often expects women in leadership positions to walk a tightrope between being seen as competent, which requires showing ambition and pleasant, which often requires a minimized ambition,” Sanderson said.
Russell Reynolds’s report found that, although women represented only 11 percent of total executive directors and 6 percent of CEO’s exits in companies that are quoted in 2024 in 2024, they received significantly more attention more than The media.
Executive women received 1.25 times more mentions than men and 1.7 times more attention, by number of articles, when they left a role. About 18 percent of the stories about the outputs of the male CEOs were negative, while for women the figure was 28 percent.