Cranfield Female FTSE Board Report 2016

FTSE 100 Companies

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