Cranfield Female FTSE Board Report 2016

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The Female FTSE Board Report 2016

FTSE 100 Companies

In addition to looking at the proportion of women on the Executive Committee, we also considered the roles women hold in these important senior management groups. The three most common ‘C-Suite’ roles are Chief Executive, Chief Financial and Chief Operating Officer. From the 79 companies for which we have data, women hold only 10% (18 out of 184) of these roles. We then grouped all the remaining roles into either Operational or Functional roles and looked at the proportions of women in each (see Table 9). Of the remaining operational roles, such as divisional or regional heads, women also only held 10% (35 out of 350). In the functional roles (e.g. marketing, communications, PR, investor relations, IT, HR, audit, risk, General Counsel and Company Secretary), women held 33% (126 out of 387). Of the 58 HR directors named on Executive Committees, 35 were women and 23 men and of the 79 Company Secretaries/General Counsels named, 31 were women but 48 men. Overall, these trends demonstrate an under-representation of women in C-suite roles and operational executive roles.

TABLE 9: EXECUTIVE COMMITTEE ROLES BY GENDER

Percent of Women

No. of Women

No. of Men

Executive Committee Roles

Chief Executive Officer/ Deputy Chief Financial Officer/ Finance Director

C-Suite

7

72

9

70

Chief Operating/ Operations Officer

2

24

10% 18

166

Operational Divisional/ Regional Heads Functional Divisional/ Regional Heads

35

315

10%

126

261

33%

3.4.4 Looking ahead We draw three main conclusions from this analysis of gender diversity across FTSE 100 Executive Committees: –– There is a lack of transparency and inconsistent reporting on the gender composition of Executive Committees, which limits our insight into relevant talent pipelines to the board. Organizations should be encouraged to monitor and report such data in a more rigorous manner. –– Women are under-represented at Executive Committee level (19.4% overall), especially in C-suite and operational roles (women make up 10% of senior executives in each). This shortage of women in senior roles will make it difficult to reach and sustain the 33% target for women on boards. –– Organizations should be encouraged to increase not only the overall percentage of women on the Executive Committee, but particularly women in operational roles. With purposeful talent management and succession planning this could conceivably be substantially changed over the next five year period. In a survey last autumn, 4 19 of the UK’s largest institutional investors stated that the continuing drive to increase women on boards was important for British business; that the current voluntary approach was effective; but that more work was required to better utilise female talent. When asked where the focus of work should next be, 58% of investors recommended extending the scope to include the Executive Committee and/or direct reports to the Executive Committee.