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The Female FTSE Board Report 2016
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Changing places:
Academics on Boards
The need to increase gender diversity on higher
education institutions and company boards provides
an opportunity to facilitate the transfer of skills and
expertise between business and academia and to
build stronger partnerships between the two sectors.
The 30% Club and KMPG are sponsoring research
undertaken by Oxford Brookes University Centre for
Diversity Policy Research and Practice to look at current
levels of participation of senior women with an academic or a corporate background on company
and university boards respectively.
Women represent 36% of all university governing body members (WomenCount 2016) and
preliminary findings suggest that there is a significant level of participation of senior women from
businesses on these boards. This is in contrast to the level of participation on FTSE boards of
senior women from academia which is very limited. Currently there are only four female senior
academics holding non-executive roles on FTSE 100 boards who are almost exclusively scientists.
There are four on FTSE 250: two of whom are in STEMM disciplines and two of whom are in
management studies. There are also three women, two on FTSE 100 and one on FTSE 250
boards who hold senior leadership roles in Higher Education Institutions but did not have an
academic career in teaching and research.
The number of senior male academics is equally low with only four of them on FTSE 100 and six
on FTSE 250 boards. These findings suggest that there is a very limited flow of expertise from
academia to the boardroom of listed companies. There is a significant talent pool in academia that
listed companies could draw from. This talent pool however, remains largely untapped in spite
of the recommendation in the first Davies report which suggested that listed companies should
look for non-executive directors in other sectors, outside the corporate mainstream, including
academia.
The full findings from the Changing Places research will be available later this year.
Professor Simonetta Manfredi
Oxford Brookes University
FTSE 100 Companies