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The Female FTSE Board Report 2016
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3.4 EXECUTIVE COMMITTEES
3.4.1 The Role and Importance of Executive Committees
As has been identified in this report and in the Davies Review reports, in order to sustain an increasing
balance of women holding corporate board directorships, the proportion of women in the executive
pipeline needs to substantially increase. This year, we are expanding the focus of our report below the
board, in order to examine gender balance at Executive Committee level.
The Executive Committee (also known as the Leadership Executive, Group Management Board, Senior
Executive Team, or similar names) is the most senior management rank below board level. It typically
comprises the Executive Directors from the board and senior executives of the company who report
directly to the CEO or CFO (in many cases this includes the Company Secretary), but it excludes the
Chairman and non-executive board members. The Executive Committee meets monthly or twice a
month and its main remit is to provide daily oversight of the company’s strategic, financial, reputational
and commercial affairs. Generally, the Executive Committee as a group has reporting responsibilities to
the board, but not executive authority in its own right. However, Executive Committee members have
significant authority within their respective remits and they are effectively the most senior executives in
charge of the daily direction and control of the business. Therefore Executive Committees provide the
main pipeline of board-ready talent, so gender balance at Executive Committee level will ultimately be
reflected in more gender-balanced boards.
3.4.2 Monitoring the Composition of Executive Committees
One of the challenges around monitoring gender composition at Executive Committee level is that
there is no mandatory reporting of this information and data are not uniformly available. This issue was
raised in the recent April 2016 BIS Consultation on the Non-Financial Reporting Directive, discussing the
definitions of “Senior Management”.
In this section, we report on the proportion of women holding positions on the FTSE 100 Executive
Committees and on the types of roles held by these women. We collected our data from company
websites and annual reports. We also wrote to each Company Secretary individually requesting the
information and we wish very much to thank those who responded to that letter. In the end we collated
data for 80 of the FTSE 100 companies. For consistency, we included in our Executive Committee
reporting the role of Company Secretary. The 20 companies whose data are not publicly available, who
did not respond to our letter, or who did respond but did not want their data included are:
Ashstead Group; Associated British Foods, Berkeley Group Holdings; Capita; Compass Group; CRH;
Glencore; GKN; Rexam; Johnson Matthey; National Grid; Next; Pearson; Persimmon; Provident Financial;
Prudential; Smiths Group; Sports Direct; St. James’s Place; and WPP.
“Without a clear centre of energy for this
issue…all the gains could be threatened
or lost”
– Subject Expert
FTSE 100 Companies